VICTORIA HISLOP (born Bromley, 1959) went into publishing and advertising after reading English at Oxford University, and then began travel writing. Her first novel, The Island, came out of a trip to Crete, inspired by the story of the leper colony of Spinalonga. An international bestseller, it became a Greek TV series. Her second novel, The Return, is set in Granada and recalls the Spanish Civil War. Victoria lives in Kent with her husband and two children, and has a house on Crete. www.victoriahislop.com
Manoli
VICTORIA HISLOP
I met Manoli Foundoulakis on 20 January 2007, in a hotel in Crete. It was at exactly six o’clock in the evening. His punctuality was only one of the many differences between Manoli and every other Greek I had ever encountered. We met because I had written a novel set on Spinalonga, a small island off Crete, which was a leper colony from 1903 to 1957, and Manoli had been asked to write a foreword to the Greek edition. He was a former leprosy sufferer, and still lived in the village opposite the island.
When I wrote The Island, my complete lack of Greek meant that I had not been able to do any research about the people who had lived on Spinalonga. Everything about the island itself, the patients and the doctors came from my imagination as I sat at my desk back in England. Indeed, Manoli was the first European with leprosy that I had ever met. I had always maintained a firm conviction that those who suffered from this disease would be as funny, clever, charming and wise as anyone else. Why would they not? And in Manoli, I saw how close to the truth my instinct had taken me.
When he emerged from the shadows of the hotel foyer to shake my hand, I was shocked. This was not because of the way he looked as, in spite of the very obvious damage that had been done to his face by the disease, Manoli was still a handsome man. It was more the feeling that a character in my novel had come to life.
I was anxious that Manoli might be critical of the assumptions I had made about the lives of people with leprosy. Instead he thanked me for lifting the stigma which had blighted his life for so many years. However, at that first meeting, someone had to translate every sentence we spoke to each other. I decided there and then that I would find time to learn Greek in order to talk to Manoli. I began my lessons in London shortly afterwards and gradually realised my ambition.
Manoli lived in the hills overlooking Spinalonga, in the village of Ano Elounda, where the streets are too narrow for cars and the population is largely made up of beautiful but elderly widows in black. In summer, we used to sit on the steps in the street, beneath his vine, sipping the overpowering raki that he had distilled himself and in winter we sat inside, my back almost melting from the heat of the wood fire that constantly blazed in the hearth.
Whenever I planned a visit to Manoli, I would put a dictionary in my bag and we would talk. His patience was matchless. One evening, when I took the narrow road up to see him, secure in the knowledge that he would be there, because he always was, I forgot both my dictionary and glasses. So Manoli and I shared his thick-lensed spectacles along with the Greek-English dictionary which he kept in his kitchen, and for many hours we ‘talked’. It was painstaking but meant that each sentence had to be worth constructing.
Manoli knew I loved to sit on a particular chair with my back to his fire and after a few hours there, I would emerge suffused with the aroma of wood smoke, my stomach full of horta (Greek spinach, for which he knew I had a passion), barbounia, and coffee, which I would make under his careful instruction. He taught me so much. The most obvious lesson was that, in spite of everything he had lived through and suffered, there was no place for self-pity. Unlike so many people, he never talked about himself, never once complained of anything.
Manoli was a very gifted man. He had immense powers of oratory, and when something stirred him, he could deliver a speech that moved everyone around him, mixing intellect and emotion in a way that even the most talented politicians often fail to do. He became chief advisor and consultant on the TV serial made for Greek television from my novel, and his house became a focal point for all actors who wanted to know what it felt like to suffer from this ancient disease. The series was dedicated to him.
He had an exceptional memory too. One afternoon during the last few weeks of his life, I visited him in hospital with a Greek actor, Theodoros Katzafados, who was playing a lead role in the TV drama. Through the filter of his oxygen mask, Manoli began to recite verse after verse from the Erotokritos, an epic love poem written in the seventeenth century in Cretan dialect, by Kornaros, Greece’s equivalent to Shakespeare. At a certain point, Theodoros joined in and they spoke the lines together but even he, who had held the stage at Epidauros every summer for decades, was amazed at Manoli’s delivery and his powers of recall, which held us both spellbound.
Age meant nothing to Manoli. Until a few weeks before his death last spring, he was as sprightly as someone half his age. Sometimes when I was with him, I felt that his walking stick was just a stage prop and that he might break into a dance routine like Fred Astaire. When he went across to Spinalonga to play a role in the scene when the patients are all cured and leaving the island, he left his stick behind and marched through the tunnel holding my arm. It felt to me that I was supported by Manoli, not the other way round. He was determined to show the reality of the cure, and nothing could have demonstrated more eloquently that leprosy had been conquered than the sight of his abandoned walking stick.
His energy characterised everything – from his passionate devotion to his family, to his strong religious faith, to the way in which he expressed his ideas. Unlike so many people with firm opinions, he would speak and listen with the same level of concentration. Whenever people talk of Manoli, they always mention his psychi – his ‘soul’. I think of this in the way I think of his hands: larger than life, generous, other-worldly. Perhaps both his soul and hands were shaped and moulded by his experience of leprosy. The positive effect he had on those around him was something very out of the ordinary.
The timelessness of the village in which he lived and the calmness with which we always talked made me feel that Manoli had all the time in the world. I felt that he would live forever: there seemed no reason for him not to, after all the physical and emotional assaults that he had survived.
Just before he died, he told me he was ready to go. With his immensely strong faith, I know he was and, moreover, was looking forward to it. On 28 May 2010 he died, peacefully at the age of eighty-seven. For him it was the right time: his punctuality was immaculate to the end.
Costa
JOHN JULIUS NORWICH (born London, 1929), is a historian, travel writer and anthologist. He has written histories of Norman Sicily, Venice, Byzantium and the Mediterranean, and presented more than thirty history documentaries for BBC TV. He is also the author of a study of Shakespeare’s Kings, and two travel books, Mount Athos and Sahara. He has recently completed a History of the Popes, and is currently working on a short history of England, as seen from 100 different locations. His annual Christmas Cracker anthology has been going for 41 years. www.johnjuliusnorwich.com
Costa
JOHN JULIUS NORWICH
His real name was Achillopoulos, but he never used it; some of his best friends never even knew it. To everyone, whatever their age or position, he was just plain Costa. He was sixty-ish when I first met him: brown as a walnut, with brilliant green eyes and hair that had gone white overnight when he was twenty. As the years passed, he came to look more and more like Picasso; often indeed, when he went out to dinner in a bistro near Grasse – where he lived when he wasn’t in some distant corner of the globe – he would be taken for the great man and obligingly sign menus with a signature indistinguishable from the original.
Brought up in Paris, London and Oxford, Costa spoke French like a native, and his English, apart from a ghost of an accent, was virtually as good. His Greek, he told us, came a poor third, but it sounded perfect to me. He had, after all, transferred from the Free French Army to the Greek as soon as he could. He seemed to be
always on the move; there were few countries in the world he hadn’t visited, and he was full of hilarious stories about what had happened to him on the road – stories almost invariably against himself. He never had much money, but his Rolleiflex was always with him and in those happy days before mass travel he had little difficulty in selling his photographs to newspapers and magazines.
And so, when in the summer of 1963 Reresby Sitwell and I decided to go to Mount Athos and clearly needed a Greek-speaker to accompany us, Costa was the obvious choice. I had been there the previous year but I had travelled alone, and the journey had been a disaster. It had pelted with rain, my Greek had proved nowhere near good enough, and the donkeys and mules that I had understood to be ubiquitous were virtually non-existent. On the third day, sopping wet and bitterly cold, I had given up in despair.
Costa had immediately accepted our invitation, as I knew he would; and – as I had also confidently expected – he made all the difference. He kept us amused, the monks adored him, and he proved, rather to his surprise, a superb interpreter. ‘Then,’ he said after a day or two – he began most sentences with that word – ‘I am astonished at the excellence of my Greek.’
Costa in the port of Alexandria, 1943
He was also able, on more than one occasion, to transform our meals. As a result of my previous experience I had perhaps laid it on pretty thick about the Athonite cuisine, for any visit to the Holy Mountain invariably spells gastronomic martyrdom. After that first trip, with the full horror of it still upon me, I had written: For the first few meals, while courage and self-discipline remain steady, a person of normal digestive sensibility may be able to contemplate – and even in part consume – the interminable platefuls of beans, spasmodically enlivened by a single slice of anchovy or a sliver of briny cheese which, if the monasteries had their way, would stand alone between himself and starvation. But on such a diet the spirit soon flags. Within a day or two those liverish-white lumps, glaring remorselessly up at him from their puddle of stone-cold grease, take on a new expression, hostile and challenging. ‘Bet you can’t’, they seem to say. And they are right.
Even more than its inexpressible nastiness, it is the uniformity of the Athonite menu that wears one down as the same grim breakfast offering of beans will reappear, congealed, at supper. It doesn’t take long to understand and appreciate the old custom of the cenobitic monasteries according to which, as the monks pass out of the refectory, the cooks ask pardon on their knees for the atrociousness of the meal. Nor to understand why, among all the ascetic disciplines of the Mountain, that of almost continuous fasting is so insistently stressed.
Reresby had wisely stuffed his rucksack with a tiny spirit stove and various succulent delicacies from Fortnum & Mason, where he was then employed. But it turned out that Costa could do more. He would chat up one guestmaster after another, who would then suddenly conjure up a tomato omelette or even a fish. It was also thanks to him that we were quite often, after dinner, presented with a tray bearing generous glasses of the home-brewed monastic hooch, deliciously aromatic and pulverisingly strong.
Dear Costa did however have one failing: he was accident-prone. He had already had one bad fall some years before in the Andes, when he was climbing with George Jellicoe and Robin Fedden, and now, one day as we were walking between monasteries, he trod on a loose pebble – always a danger on Athonite paths – missed his footing and, since the path was unusually narrow and cut into the side of a hill, landed some six or eight feet down the slope. At first he pooh-poohed the accident and plodded on to our destination; but by the next morning he was in agony. He insisted on continuing the journey, but he was bent double and clearly in considerable pain.
At the next monastery – Xenophontos – the monks took pity on him and bore him off to their dispensary (then rare on the Holy Mountain) where one of their number insisted on giving him an epidural injection. The equipment looked far from sterile, and I trembled for him; but the treatment proved an almost miraculous success and the following day he was walking as well as ever. When we returned to London he told his doctor, who was astonished. It was, he said, quite a dangerous procedure; it depended on knowing precisely the right place to put the needle, and was something usually left to specialists. The old monk, it seemed, couldn’t have done it better.
APART FROM THAT one little contretemps, that second trip of mine to the Mountain was a terrific success; we all enjoyed it enormously, and we learned a lot. I was determined to travel with Costa again; and, three years later, I did.
This time it was he who took the initiative. Early in 1966, my telephone rang. ‘Then,’ said a voice – it could have been no one else – ‘then, there is an expedition leaving soon for the Tibesti Mountains in the Sahara where no one ever goes and where they will make a film. They want two more people so as to have three Land Rovers, which will be safer than two. Then, can you come?’ Our fellow-travellers, he explained, would be three ladies of his acquaintance, all of them experienced and passionate sahariennes; and they had secured the services of a first-rate guide who knew the desert like the back of his hand.
Now it happened that on the previous day I had typed the final full stop to the first volume of a book that I had been working on for the previous two years; I felt that I deserved a break before starting on the second. Anyway, the temptation was irresistible. Three weeks later we were off. Costa and I flew via Algiers to Djanet in the far south of Algeria, where we met the rest of the party. Then we turned the Land Rovers due east, and headed off into the unknown.
I wrote a book about our adventure and, after some forty-five years, have had to refer to it repeatedly in the pages that follow. The trip was by far the most exciting that I have ever made. Since it lasted some eight weeks, I cannot begin to do it justice in this article – and anyway I am not writing about the Sahara, but about Costa. There was one particular incident, which occurred after about a fortnight when we had reached Auzou in northern Chad, which showed him at his most typical.
When we travel in exotic lands, we nearly all of us run up sooner or later with the problem of the uninhibited onlookers – usually in the form of a group of locals who materialise from nowhere, take up a position a yard or two away and stare and stare, fascinated by one’s every action. Even on picnics, this technique can be unnerving enough; but at a night camp, where there are no tents to afford the minimum of privacy and not even any bushes for cover, it can become a serious matter. Never have I known it to assume such formidable proportions as that evening at Auzou. The crowd must have numbered at least forty – forty pairs of staring, unblinking eyes, missing nothing, examining every item we drew from our kitbags, taking in our every move. Never, let me emphasise, was there anything remotely hostile about them. They were perfectly friendly – just very, very curious, and utterly immovable.
Our own reactions varied between agonised embarrassment and stoic fortitude. None of us felt like asking them, in so many words, to go away; without a common language, such a request could only have been exceedingly impolite, and the last thing we wanted was to cause offence. At the same time, there were other needs that were ever more pressing.
After perhaps an hour, one or two of the older spectators had slipped away; but the hard core that remained, consisting almost entirely of children and adolescents, had obviously decided that a long vigil lay ahead, and were digging themselves in for the night. At last Costa took the matter in hand. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘if they are looking for entertainment, that is what we must give them. Then they will be satisfied and go away.’ The rest of us were doubtful; but he, by now looking forward hugely to his coming performance, was not to be shaken. Delving into his kitbag, he extracted some colourful garment, twisted it expertly into a funny hat and put it on. Then, trousers rolled up to the knee, he began to dance. And as he danced he sang:
Il y avait dix filles dans un pré,
Toutes les dix à marier;
Il y avait Line, il y avait Chine,
Il y
avait Claudine et Martine,
Ha, ha, Cat’rinette et Cat’rina.
Il y avait la belle Suzon,
La duchesse de Montbazon,
Il y avait Célimène
Et il y avait la Dumaine.
Costa was not, perhaps, outstandingly gifted for the dance; his grasp of melody was also at moments uncertain. But he made up amply in verve what he lacked in technique, and he certainly deserved a greater success than he achieved. His audience was baffled. They had not bargained for this. Having no idea how they were meant to respond, they wisely chose not to respond at all.
Visibly shaken, Costa tried again:
Le fils du Roi vint à passer,
Toutes les dix les fit coucher;
Paille à Line, paille à Chine,
Paille à Claudine et Martine,
Ha, ha, Cat’rinette et Cat’rina.
Paille à la belle Suzon,
La duchesse de Montbazon,
Paille à Célimène,
Mais bon lit à la Dumaine.
The line of faces still stared stonily back at him. There was not a word, not a whisper, far less a smile. Now genuinely sad, poor Costa took off his funny hat, unrolled his trousers and returned to the rest of us, shaking his head. ‘En effet,’ he murmured, ‘c’est un publique très difficile.’
Then, to our astonishment, we saw that it had worked. Within minutes of the song’s end, the entire audience had faded away into the darkness. Just what had prompted them to leave remains a mystery. Perhaps they had enjoyed it all more than their faces had revealed and had accepted it as we had hoped they would, as the grand finale to a memorable evening. Perhaps, on the other hand, they had hated it and been impelled to flee from the dreadful possibility of an encore. My own theory is that by directing his energies so squarely towards them Costa had somehow made them feel involved, saddled with responsibilities they did not understand. The whole thing had suddenly become too complicated. They preferred to go.
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