The Ariadne Objective

by Wes Davis

  On Saturday, March 3, Heydte and a few others drove Leigh Fermor to a village outside Vienna. After lunch and rounds of Himbeergeist at an inn, they took a walk through the snow-blanketed forest. The talk that day was of Europe’s heroic past and the waning days of chivalry. When they said good-bye, Leigh Fermor had no way of knowing that he and Heydte would cross paths again.

  IN THE FOLLOWING months Leigh Fermor drifted through the last outposts of an aristocratic world that was rapidly disappearing. He crossed the Danube into Czechoslovakia the next day. Nearly a month later he entered Hungary. As he rambled across what had once been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the introductions that flowed from the baron who had outfitted him in Munich led him from one aristocratic estate to another. He was getting a glimpse of life as it might have been when Franz Joseph was emperor. But the news of the day that filtered in along the way was ominous.

  He was in Transylvania when he heard that Hitler had ordered a bloody purge of the SA. Ernst Röhm, whose photo he had noticed in a shop window months earlier, was among those killed. A month later word came that the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, had been shot to death by Nazi gunmen in Vienna.

  In a remote corner of the Carpathians he met an elderly rabbi who, with his sons, was visiting his brother at the logging camp where the younger man was foreman. The foreman wanted to know why Leigh Fermor was traveling. He fumbled for an answer and finally said, “For fun.” The foreman responded with something in Yiddish that made the others laugh. Then he explained—“Es is ist a goyim naches” meant it was something only a gentile would enjoy. “It seemed to hit the nail on the head,” Leigh Fermor thought.

  When the conversation turned to Hitler and the Nazis, they all spoke of them as if they were “a nightmare that might suddenly vanish, like a cloud evaporating.”

  BY DECEMBER 1934, a little more than a year after he left home, he had reached Varna, on the Black Sea, and was making his way south along the coast toward Burgas. Constantinople now lay a mere four or five days’ trek to the southeast. The track he had been following all day wandered along between the sea, to the east, and a span of foothills that mounted like rounded stairsteps toward the Balkan and Rhodope ranges in the west. In the distance he could discern signs of life—smoke rising from hillside villages and the red patchwork of plowed fields—but an old Tartar fisherman puffing on a narghile outside his hut was the only person he encountered along the trail.

  As the day wore on, the landscape grew emptier, as if the country itself were petering out as his journey approached its end. Maybe it was the solitude that made it feel as if the world itself were darkening and dwindling, or perhaps it was the foreboding of winter, which was about to close its grip on the countryside. But at the same time the shafts of bright sunlight that broke through in the clearings hinted at vistas that lay beyond his original destination. “A promise of the Aegean and the Greek islands roved the cold Bulgarian air,” he felt.

  On one of the hills he glimpsed a cluster of beehive huts that must have belonged to a Sarakatsani band. These were nomadic Greeks who trailed their flocks to each season’s best grazing. Their summer haunts were likely high in the Rhodope Mountains. Walking across the plains and valleys, Leigh Fermor would sometimes come across the decaying circles of thatch—like the gravestones of their huts—that marked the makeshift hamlets where they had spent the winter months.

  Late in the afternoon he found himself descending into a rock-strewn cove. When the last of the daylight faded, he fished a flashlight from his pack and pressed on. But the trail seemed to disappear as the terrain fell away in a steep pitch toward the water below. All at once his grip on the rock let go, and the next instant he landed in the water. “Jarred and shaken,” he hauled himself from the pool, “shuddering with cold.” He could see his flashlight emitting its now-useless beacon on the bottom of the deeper end of the pool.

  He tried to shout for help, but the word was not there in the Bulgar he had learned. What came out instead were cries of “Dobar vecher!”—“Good evening, Good evening!” Feeling his way along in the darkness, he inched across the pool until he came to a sandy stretch of shore. Here he noticed a light coming from the rocks nearby, and when he got closer he saw that there was a door, which he pulled open.

  He could make out that it was a long, shallow cave, with stalactites studding the ceiling that arched high overhead. Someone had built up a front wall by filling spaces between the natural rock formations with rubble. A group of men were sitting around a fire. As he stumbled inside, several of them rushed to help him. They did what they could to dry him and clean the cut he had received in the fall.

  When his eyes adjusted to the flickering light, he surveyed the company he had fallen in with. “They were wild looking men,” he thought. All were dressed in ragged clothing, some in brownish hues, others in shades of blue. A handful wore peaked caps. It took Leigh Fermor a moment to understand that his lot had been cast with a mixed company of shepherds and fishermen. He was reminded of Polyphemus and Sinbad—the most remarkable of shepherds and sailors.

  He could see the tools of the men’s work heaped around the cave: on one side, spears, fish traps, and bait baskets; on the other, wicker baskets and goatskin bags used in making cheese from goat milk. Hidden away in the deeper shadows were the goats themselves. He watched their eyes glowing whenever a flare of firelight reached them.

  The men rustled up a dinner for him of lentils and mackerel-like fried fish. Leigh Fermor found the fish delicious and asked what they were called. When one of the fisherman replied, “Skoumbri,” the shepherds protested. “No, no, no,” they exclaimed, the word was “skumria.” The shepherds, it turned out, were Bulgars, the sailors Greek.

  As the hours wore on, his first night in the company of Greeks turned into a full-blown bacchanalia. One of the shepherds broke out a goatskin bagpipe. A sailor picked out a tumultuous tune on the bouzouki. Digging into his pack, Leigh Fermor pulled out two bottles of raki and passed them around. The fiery clear liquor the locals distilled from grape skins and pulp—a far cry from the anise-laced Turkish variety—soon had the party in full swing. At the height of the revels a ferocious-looking sailor called Dimitri began to careen around the cave in a mock belly dance, which was soon taken up by one of the shepherds.

  For Leigh Fermor the camaraderie he felt with the Greeks in particular seemed to corroborate his growing attraction to Greece. It was Dimitri, the dancer, who finally gave voice to the feeling by naming the special connection that tied them together. “Lordos Veeron!” he said. Seeing that the sailor had “raised his bunched fingers in a gesture of approval,” Leigh Fermor eventually understood that the oddly pronounced name referred to his own countryman Lord Byron. Even here in the middle of nowhere the poet, who died of fever while preparing to attack a Turkish fortress, was remembered as a hero of the Greek struggle for independence.

  Leigh Fermor had a difficult time getting to sleep that night. Over the sounds that reverberated through the cave—the men’s snoring punctuated now and then by the clink of a goat bell—he could hear the undulations of the Black Sea washing against the shore. Its whispering hinted at still-more-distant shores. “There was much to think about,” he told himself, “especially Greece and the Greeks, which were drawing nearer every day.”

  IT WAS NEW YEAR’S DAY when Leigh Fermor arrived in Constantinople. He had been traveling for just over a year and had covered more than 1,500 miles as the crow flies. But a footloose vagabond made for a haphazard crow. With the twists and turns thrown in by chance along the road, he had easily traveled twice that far. And he was not ready to stop. Constantinople, or Istanbul as it was called in the recently established Turkish republic, had been the eastern hub of the Greek world for centuries. Fascinating as it was to be here after so many months of traveling, the sights and sounds of the exotic city only made him yearn more to set foot in Greece itself. He mailed off five pounds to repay the consul who had helped him in Munich. Then, early in the
new year, he struck out toward the west.

  The first spot he wanted to visit was the one that had hovered in the back of his mind since the idea for this journey first occurred to him more than a year earlier. The young travel writer Robert Byron’s description of his trip to Mount Athos in The Station—and the image of Byzantium that Byron’s book had planted in his head—had provided the spark for Leigh Fermor’s own adventure. Now he wanted to see its famous monasteries for himself.

  The holy mountain, as the Greeks called it, was nearly four hundred miles away, opposite the Dardanelles, on the far side of the Thracian Sea. Getting there by land meant trailing the coasts of Thrace and Macedonia. He knew that in ancient times innumerable ships bound from Asia Minor to Greece had foundered trying to round the peninsula formed by the mountain. Herodotus told how Xerxes, when he was preparing to invade Greece early in the fifth century BC, put great armies of men to work digging a channel across the isthmus northwest of the mountain, so that his ships could avoid rounding the Athos cape. In Herodotus’s view Xerxes had done it out of sheer egotism—because he could. “For though it was possible, without any great labour, to have drawn the ships over the isthmus, he commanded them to dig a channel for the sea of such a width that two triremes might pass through rowed abreast.” It took the Persian leader three years to get his navy to the far side of the isthmus. By February Leigh Fermor had made his way there.

  What he discovered when he reached Mount Athos was a world apart. A rugged finger of land jutting forty miles out into the Aegean, the peninsula was cut off from the mainland by Xerxes’ channel. It had its own culture, even its own constitution. Legend held that the Virgin herself had once come here, though later on such a visit would have required a special dispensation: for nearly a thousand years a strictly enforced rule prohibited “all women, all female animals, eunuchs or beardless boys.” Monks and hermits had maintained legal proprietorship over the peninsula since the tenth century. But holy men had scratched out an existence among the rocks even before that. One of them, Euthymius of Salonica, who retreated to Athos in the ninth century, was said to have spent his first years here foraging on all fours like a goat.

  The earliest of the monasteries, known as the Great Lavra, had been founded by Athanasios around 960. Since then the fortunes of Athos had risen and fallen. At its peak the population of monks may have reached as high as ten thousand. Now there remained a small fraction of that number, scattered across twenty monasteries. For Leigh Fermor, who was still in the thrall of Robert Byron’s book about the place, a visit to Athos offered a glimpse of what the great monastic tradition of the east had been like at its apex. To Byron, who had been here in 1926 and 1927, Mount Athos was the Byzantine Empire itself, frozen in amber—a “station,” he once said, “of a faith where all the years have stopped.” You could see the truth of that just by watching the sun come up … at eleven. Even the clocks still ran on Byzantine time.

  Leigh Fermor found life on Athos relaxed. He grew fond of the monks, with their “fierce-whiskered, brigand-faces.” You could watch their lively eyes “smoulder and flash and twinkle under brows that are always tied up in knots of rage or laughter or concentration or suddenly relaxed into bland Olympian benevolence.” The monks rose early, and they were often called upon to fast, but by Western standards their discipline was lenient. The monastic rule they followed went back to the fourth-century system of laws organized by St. Basil, whose idea of the contemplative life favored peaceful contentment over deprivation. As Basil described it in his letters, the monastery he founded in the hills above the Black Sea was a spiritual arcadia. The mountain plain on which it sat was hedged in by a forest “of many-coloured and various trees” and watered by cool running brooks, “so that even Calypso’s isle, which Homer seems to admire beyond all others for its beauty, is insignificant compared to this.” Reading Basil’s letters later on, Leigh Fermor was struck by the joyfulness that ran through their depiction of monastic life. “ ‘Light,’ ‘peace’ and ‘happiness’ are the epithets, often recurring, that St. Basil finds most fitting to capture the atmosphere of his cloister.” Life at Athos, untouched as it was by many of the changes in the outside world, hinted at the spiritual and pastoral pleasures Basil and his fourth-century monks had once enjoyed—with the brilliant Aegean supplying a watery hedge. Abundant wine and the occasional stinging thimbleful of raki were added benefits.

  Settled on Greek soil for the first time in his life, Leigh Fermor spent his weeks on Athos basking in the mountain’s monastic tranquillity and preparing himself to plunge deeper into the Greek countryside. The first job, he knew, was “to convert imperfect ancient Greek into the rudiments of the modern.” On February 11, with the grounds of the monastery muffled by a heavy blanket of snow, he turned twenty.

  THE TIMELESS RHYTHMS of monastic routine on Mount Athos obscured the unrest that was brewing in Greece. But the conflict soon became impossible to ignore. Late in the afternoon on the first day of March 1935, a group of conspirators led by retired naval officers slipped into the Greek naval base on Salamis and took control of a pair of cruisers—the Helle and the flagship Averof—along with two submarines and a handful of other vessels. Once at sea, the leaders radioed the garrisons of other Greek bases, calling for the military to rise up and overthrow the government. The coup aimed to throttle what the rebels feared was a growing monarchist sentiment in the regime that had recently assumed power. Eleftherios Venizelos, a Cretan revolutionary and former prime minister of Greece, would soon emerge as the rebellion’s de facto leader.

  In Athens, rebels occupied the military college and the barracks of the presidential guard. In Macedonia they seized installations in several towns. Meanwhile, the Averof made for Crete, where Venizelos—who had retreated to the island after an attempt on his life the previous summer—assumed command of the movement.

  On the other side, the remainder of the Greek army, now commanded by the minister of war, pushed toward Macedonia to confront Venizelos’s rebels. A week of sleet and snow had held the fighting to a minimum, but now that the weather was clear the two armies were clashing along the Struma River.

  Since leaving the monastery at Mount Athos, Leigh Fermor had traveled up the Chalcidice peninsula. Near Madytos, nearly seventy miles northwest of Athos, he borrowed a horse and struck out to explore Macedonia and Thrace. As he traveled along, he found that the countryside was buzzing with news of the rebellion. And by the time he met up with a light cavalry unit that had gotten separated from the main body of the Greek army, the excitement seemed to be sweeping him along. There was nothing to do but spur his own horse into a gallop to join the column as it trotted by.

  As the day wore on, the unit made its way northward, and soon they were galloping toward the sound of musket fire and shelling. When they reached the Struma at a town called Orliako, north of Nigrita, there was real fighting under way. They heard firing from both banks, but the rebellion had already cracked. At one point Leigh Fermor followed the cavalry troop into the river. “It was the most extraordinary thing,” he thought. “The water comes up to your waist, and the horse’s head sticks out like a chessman.” Once the shooting stopped, the horsemen drew their sabers and “thundered fast but bloodlessly across the wooden bridge.” It was Leigh Fermor’s first taste of war. It was also, he knew, “the nearest any of us would get to a cavalry charge.”

  BUT THERE WAS more of Greece to explore, so Leigh Fermor pulled up short once the excitement of the charge had settled. He shouted farewell to his new comrades, and after pledging to meet again, he “watched them jingle away, their spurs clinking against the steel scabbards of their sabers; then pounded off towards the hills and the far-sounding goat-bells.”

  He eventually made his way to Athens, where he met a Romanian girl named Balasha Cantacuzene. A few years older than he, Balasha was a painter from an aristocratic family who had gone to school in France and England. She was, to Paddy’s eye, also extraordinarily beautiful, and she shared his enthusia
sm for literature and the arts. They spent the summer together living in a disused watermill on the Peloponnese, the mountainous peninsula that juts out into the Mediterranean on the southwestern arm of the Greek mainland. As autumn began turning to winter, they traveled by steamer and train to Baleni in northern Romania, where her family owned a house. That winter the snow “reached the windowsills and lasted till spring.”