Londos was the Cogia Pasha, the prime minister to Ali Pasha’s son Veli Pasha, who governed this part of the Peloponnese on his father’s behalf. At the time he was only nineteen, so more or less Byron’s contemporary, ‘tiny with a face like a chimpanzee and a cap one third of his height’. He was already a devoted student of politics. Hobhouse noted that: ‘We could in an instant discover the Signor Londos to be a person in power: his chamber was crowded with visitants, claimants, and complainants; his secretaries and clerks were often presenting papers for his signature; and the whole appearance of our host and his household presented us with the singular spectacle of a Greek in authority - a sight which we had never before seen in Turkey.’ When Byron first arrived Londos was reticent about any political discussion, as Byron was after all the guest of, and recent visitor to, Ali Pasha himself. But as the week wore on they became closer, and by the time the entourage left a week later a life long friendship between the two lovers of Greek identity had taken hold.
Twelve years later Londos led a Greek insurrection at Patras which became the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence. He was a leading figure throughout the struggle, and is now a national hero whose portrait hangs in many a Peloponnese bar and bus station, but at the time, after the struggle had been won, he backed the wrong faction in the Greek roulette of independence politics and the subsequent and inevitable civil war. He had contact with Byron again throughout the War, and Byron wrote to him that ‘Greece has ever been to me, as it must be for all men of any feeling or education, the promised land of valour, of the arts, and of liberty through the ages.’ In his journal Byron wrote that ‘Andreas Londos is my old friend and acquaintance since we were lads in Greece together.’
***
Foul winds eventually turn fair and on 14 December 1809 they hired a ten-oared galliot, hoisted a lateen sail and crossed the Gulf of Corinth from whatever-it’s-called to the north side. By the evening they had reached the charming inlet and port now known as Galaxidi, the jumping off point for Delphi. They disembarked and found an inn, where they had to ‘turn two parties out of two rooms half filled with onions’. As usual Fletcher made Byron’s and Hobhouse’s beds, before joining the rest of the entourage in the lesser room where they tucked down as best they could, although poor Fletcher was not a happy valet having ‘a cheek, tooth and headache and catching twenty lice’.
Today Galaxidi is a delightful low-key, low-rise harbour, and fully returned to the prosperity it enjoyed before the Ottoman occupation. The hilltop church - its red cupola the first sight of Galaxidi through the binoculars - welcomes one in from the southern horizon. Outer islands show the way, one even just sports a church, and others just a vineyard. Some kind soul has built a monolith on a potentially treacherous reef, and one turns hard to port after passing it and straight into the harbour.
Like Patras it played a leading part in the War of Independence, and like Patras it was revenge-sacked by the Turks for its troubles. Its history has always involved the sea, and there is now an excellent Nautical Historical Museum tucked away in the cobbled backstreets, with a replica figurehead from Cutty Sark outside. The museum’s resident dog looks like a goat, all the signs and literature are only in Greek - normally annoying but for some reason here rather refreshing - and the gift shop is now slightly emptier than it was before the writer’s wife’s visit earlier this morning.
The harbour that the Byron galliot pulled into is now the much smaller fishing harbour, a charming inlet lapping on the pavements of identikit tavernas, where the food really is a secondary consideration to the setting, peaceful in the near and spectacular in the far. Byron first saw Mount Parnassus from Vostizza on what must have been a particularly clear autumn day, and our first sight of:
Oh, thou Parnassus! whom I now survey,
Not in the phrensy of a dreamer’s eye,
Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,
But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,
In the wild pomp of mountain-majesty!
was from the Taksis Taverna in the clarity of an early May summer morning. It was one of those occasions when Byron and the writer met through time.
As elsewhere throughout the Mediterranean the larger commercial fishing boats berths are making way for those intended for visiting yachtsmen. It’s a question of unsentimental economics: a yacht brings in more euros to a port than a trawler. The nutrient poor Mediterranean has never been rich in fish - even the Romans used to complain about poor catches - but recent advancements in fish finding technology and the flagrant disregard for conservation by the fishermen themselves has meant that large-scale commercial fishing in the Mediterranean is now financially unsupportable. The trawler fishermen we met in Greece were all Egyptians (Egypt’s fishing industry was destroyed by the Aswan Dam), and they looked like they had had enough too. There has subsequently been a revival of small-scale, almost hobby, fishing by one or two men in small open boats, and it is these dozens of skiffs and dories that now fill the Galaxidi harbour in which Byron arrived, while the larger harbour developed after the Second World War for old-style commercial fishing is smartened up and awaiting visiting yachts like Vasco da Gama.
Like Byron and the entourage we only stayed one night as Delphi beckons as powerfully as ever. Leaving Galaxidi, heading north and east the landscape changes immediately: to the west all is fertile, cultivated and populated, then just over a small ridge the valley which leads up to Delphi is barren in comparison, barely green, with boulders tumbling ominously down the slopes. One’s eyes are drawn up, and there is Mount Parnassus glowering down at her subjects below. Over the next days we are going to see a lot of each other. I don’t know if it’s something I said but she never seems to approve. There are gods galore living in Parnassus’s cleft at Delphi, Zeus himself, Apollo of course, and yet it’s the spirit of snow-capped Mount Parnassus that seems to dominate.
Long before the worshippers of Greek gods came here it had been holy ground for the Mycenaeans, and before them the worshippers of Gaia, the earth goddess, daughter of Chaos and mother of Heaven. I was looking for the mystical cleft in one of Mount Parnassus’s folds, the geological statement which once seen has explained to visitors from the beginnings of time why the gods would meet here.
And have you noticed how the gods always live in the most inconvenient places? Machu Picchu in Peru, Mount Kailash in Tibet, Mauna Kea in Hawaii, Uluru in Australia, all major expeditions, acts of faith, as if the gods want to be sure you really want to visit them. At least Zeus was less demanding: looking for the centre of the universe he released two eagles from its opposite poles, and after great flights through the ether they met on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, high above the Gulf of Corinth. Later Apollo made the site his seat, and taking the form of a dolphin (delphis) to guide Cretan sailors to him, renamed it Delphi.
Greek gods like Apollo differ from humans mainly in being immortal. For Ancient Greeks there was no afterlife; this was it. The gods had every human frailty: some were jealous, others were seductive, most could be devious, unpredictability was only to be expected, and cussedness not unknown. Perhaps it was cussedness that attracted them to Delphi.
Apollo’s worshippers built his temple to align with the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset, and within it, at the exact spot where Zeus’s eagles had met, at the navel of the planet, they set a sacred stone. Over that stone they built an inner sanctum, a temple for an oracle, and for a thousand years the Delphic Oracle, the mouthpiece of Apollo, would be consulted once every moon cycle. The oracle herself, always called Pythia, would be a fifty-year-old virgin (in greater supply then than now) at the start of her tenure and would hold the job for life. The sanctum happened to be built on north/south and east/west fault lines, and the pneuma, the breath of the earth, arising from them would induce trances to help with prophecies, which were either intentionally or pneuma-tically given as ambiguities.
In Byron’s time the only way up to Delphi was via the town of Crisso, resting peacefully below the site on Parnassus’s early slopes, and from there to take the ten-kilometre, thousand-metre-high horseback ride up to what was the village of Castri which occupied the site. Most visitors today hardly notice Crisso at all as they sweep past it on the highway which approaches the new town of Delphi, half a mile and tucked around the corner from the famous old archaeological site of Delphi itself. Byron was rather impressed with one aspect of Crisso: apparently the women were of such easy virtue that he suggested that it would have been better to build a temple to Aphrodite than Apollo. In spite of conscientious research the writer is unable to confirm.
Not having a horse, and a thousand-metre climb in May being a long one for Shanks’s pony, the writer took the easy option and drove. At first all was well as the track was a road of sorts, and a bit four-wheel drive-y in parts, but I had a hire car so that bounced and groaned up just fine. But then suddenly, about half way up, a road works sign on trestles blocked the road. I had to get out and walk after all, safe at least in the knowledge my car blocking the road wasn’t going to cause a traffic jam. Actually the climb is not too strenuous with Parnassus pulling you along, and an amble on the way down with the Gulf views to settle the stomach. Wild flowers, goats’ bells and the scent of burnt almonds escort you along the track, and when you pause to take a breath the world pauses with you. Byron saw six eagles here, although Hobhouse later ruled that they were vultures.
Reading about their visit now, one has the feeling that Byron and Hobhouse were rather unimpressed by their first brush with the antiquities of Ancient Greece. Hobhouse wrote that ‘divested of its ancient name this spot would have nothing very remarkable or alluring.’ So often as one re-visits Byron’s Grand Tour one cannot help feel that the places have changed for the worse, but Delphi stands out as an exception. In 1809 the site was occupied by Greek shepherds and goatherds and their respective flocks, but they were not Greek in the Hellenic sense of understanding the word and they made no connection at all between the columns and ruins in which they grazed their flocks and among which they sheltered for the night and any ancestors. After a week of patriotic political stirrings with Andrea Londos, and then a visit to Greece’s disinherited past - a past still glorious in Byron’s Classics educated mind - we can now see in Byron’s verses and letters the first stirrings of his Greek national consciousness.
The first ancient sites they passed were the Sanctuary of Athena and Temple of Tholos and then at the base of the cleft the Castalian Spring, the very spot where Apollo prevailed, Pegasus landed, the Muses quenched their thirsts and generations of blocked poets have sought their inspiration. Byron took the powers of the waters seriously, drinking it ‘from half a dozen streamlets, some not of the purest, before we decided to our satisfaction which was the true Castalian, and even that had a villainous twang.’ A guide showed them around the ruins, making wild claims about the oracle’s domain, Byron noting that ‘a little above Castri is a cave, supposed the Pythian, of immense depth; the upper part is paved, and now a cow-house.’ Of course it was nothing of the sort.
If Byron and Hobhouse were under-whelmed by the remains at Delphi the writer must admit to being rather overwhelmed, partly because it was one of the few occasions when a modern tourist complex had been done sympathetically. The village of Castri remained on the site Byron visited until the whole complex was bought by the French government for their archaeologists in 1891. The ‘mud poor’ villagers were moved to a new place, called Delphi, half a mile around the corner. Castri was excavated and the site evolved into what we can see today. The new museum is located discreetly, the car parks are out of sight, the signs are low and explain just enough of what each ruin was, the tour guides don’t shout, the ropes guiding one along the approved route are barely noticed. Perhaps if my friends could return now they would be, well, if not overwhelmed, maybe just plain whelmed.
I had contacted a guide for the visit to Delphi, Penny Unger, a friend of a friend of Gillian’s, who had been a fellow guide at the V&A Museum and who had married a Greek and settled in Amfissa, the nearest town to Delphi. We meet in the café of the Acropole Hotel. Penny is younger than I had expected, conspicuously of childbearing age, and blonder. She wears large purple spectacles on a chain. The spectacles go on and come off regularly. Around her shoulders is a thin cardigan, on her feet sensible boots.
She could only have a cut glass English accent: ‘Now do you want to see anything in particular?’
’Yes,’ I say, ‘Lord Byron was here two hundred years ago. I have some quotes from him and some notes from his travelling companion. He was a naughty boy and carved his name in a pillar. There are some pretty good directions...’
’Ha!’ she gasps, ‘do you believe in coincidences?’
’Not normally. I’m more of a synchronicity merchant on the whole.’
’Yes, quite so, just yesterday my friend Apostolos from the municipality said we should do something special to celebrate the anniversary of Lord Byron’s visit.’
’He knows the cow’s cave, the pillar, everywhere they went?’ I ask.
’He does,’ she smiles and delves into her bag. She looks around the empty café and lowers her voice, ‘Apostolos knows everything.’Moments later she is on her mobile to him: ‘Apostolos...’ that’s all I can understand directly but am not surprised when he appears a few moments later.
We jump into Apostolos’s people carrier and soon arrive at the Castalian Springs. They are now fenced in because of the danger of falling boulders. ‘Two hundred years ago no problem one or two visitors at the Springs, now...’ and he makes signs for a land slide. We leave there and walk down to the ruins of the monastery. Several dozen pillars lie randomly in the grass. A path of sorts surrounds them. Apostolos knows his pillars and heads straight for the one with Byron’s scratched graffito. We squat down beside him. He points to some faint indentations. I move through different angles, up and down, side to side, and with the sun at a certain angle, me at another, the pillar at another, my Polaroid sunglasses on, his finger pointing precisely at a point on the pillar I can just about make out a B. Later in his office he shows me one he had prepared earlier, with a dusting of powder brushed over and yes, m’lud did indeed vandalise a pillar at Delphi.
Back at the site, after she has whisked me round the museum, in rather sprightly style for one so pregnant, I ask Penny if she felt that they had done an Elgin.
’What do you mean?’ she asks suspiciously.
’Well, it’s as if they have taken the best bits from the site and put them in the museum. Galling enough if the museum is in London,but worse here when it’s on site.’
She looks me over, as if to see if I can be trusted with a state secret. Evidently I can and she says, ‘not all the pieces are from the site. This site I mean. Some from other sites. So reproduced.’
’You mean they’re replicas?’ I ask.
’Well not exactly replicas in that sense, but there was not much left here lying around, what with the Dorians and Nero and Constantine. And then the Turks. Complete philistines. Half of Amfissa comes from here. Well not half, but you know what I mean.’
At the top of the site is the stadium where they held the Pythian Games, the forerunner to the Olympics - although the Pythians had to compete in the nude, so depriving themselves of sponsorship opportunities. At this point Penny has an earnestness attack and we part, but flippant is as flippant does.
And so the Byron entourage left Delphi for the short journey to Athens. They passed though Livadia, Thebes - now Thiva - and Skourta, ‘a miserable deserted village’ then and a miserable polluted town now, all the way without much interest or incident. If the road was unexciting then it is duller now, and the land becomes a featureless Athens suburb soon after Skourta; Thebes is particularly disappointing, there is no sign of Oedipus or his mother, still less Dionys
us or his vineyard. I looked everywhere, but Thebes feels like it has never recovered from its destruction by Alexander in 335bc. Thus they proceeded through Ottoman outposts until on Christmas Eve 1809 they found an inn ten miles short of the small and unimportant provincial town of Athens, the glories of which had been the subject of so many hours of Classics study, into which they rode unnoticed and bemused the following day, Christmas Day,1809.
Chapter Twelve
ATHENS, THE GRAND TOUR DAYS
26 DECEMBER 1809 - 5 MARCH 1810 | 9-31 MAY 2009
Byron hasn’t changed much over the last two hundred years, but Athens is someplace else entirely. Transport him forward to any of the other places we have visited so far, to Lisbon, fairytale Cintra, Sevilla, to Jerez or Cadiz, the dreaded Gibraltar, Cagliari, barren Malta, even sad Tepelenë, and he could soon guess where we are, but unless he were standing underneath the Acropolis - Athens would be unrecognisable.
His first view of Athens was from Phyle, then a pine-clad hillbut now a locally resented gypsy encampment. His enthusiasm was aroused immediately: ‘...the plain of Athens, Pentelicus, Hymettus, the Aegean, and the Acropolis, burst upon the eye at once; in my opinion, a more glorious prospect than even Cintra.’ No such view exists today. The plains have become off-white concrete suburbs, the view to the Aegean has been long lost to smog, through which only the faintest outline of the Acropolis can be seen if one knows exactly where to look, and then looks hard.
Of the Athens of two hundred years ago we know quite a lot from the contemporaneous accounts and from some of the engravings mentioned in Acknowledgments. It was a small and rather unimportant provisional town, the fiefdom of one of the Black Eunuchs at Constantinople, ranked only 43rd in the Ottoman hierarchy of cities. It was run as a corruptocracy by a voivode or governor, Suleyman Aga, who was expected to submit to the Porte in Constantinople not only the taxes from the city but his personal tribute to the eunuch from whom he bought the rights to govern. He himself was assisted by a disdar, a military governor, whose fiefdom was the Acropolis. He in turn had to pay the voivode for his appointment, and so charged the curious and the collector for access to the Acropolis. He and the likes of Lord Elgin - of whom more later - soon built up a mutually reliant relationship.
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