by Dilys Powell
Meanwhile visitors swarmed to Knossos and the Villa. There were parties of Swedes and Danes, Germans and Americans. Pierpont Morgan arrived in his yacht (‘quite pleasant people’). In one month of 1926 Evans received three English parties, each of between a hundred and a hundred and fifty people; he entertained Dawson of The Times, H. A. L. Fisher and another scholastic character of whom he remarked, ‘I never saw anyone expand so over his tea! … Mrs Edith Wharton the novelist’, he added, ‘is due, so you see this really is the hub.’
And there were local guests to be entertained. At Easter about thirty people would sit down to lunch in the Villa garden; caterers from Herakleion sent waiters; and domestic talent from Knossos – Kosti, and Maria in her black weeds, and Manoli Markoyannakis, at that time the houseboy, and probably Spiro Vasilakis, a reliable and respected member of the team of workmen – lent a hand. Recounting this long afterwards Manoli spoke with awe about the arrival of provisions from England, champagne, gin, whisky, jam, tinned meat – ‘Why,’ he exclaimed, ‘one year there were 29,000 drachmas to pay in customs dues on one single consignment of food and drink!’ (At the time 29,000 drachmas represented in English money about ninety pounds.) Perhaps the sum is not altogether surprising. Piet de Jong, who spent months living and working at the Villa, told me that the rest of the party might drink Cretan wine, but not Evans. He always drank French wine; occasionally, to celebrate a success or cheer himself up after a disappointment, he would broach a bottle of champagne which he shared with the others.
The choice of foreign wine is not to be taken as an instance of prejudice. Cretan wine does not suit everybody; I have known English visitors who developed a rash from drinking it. All the same by avoiding it Evans may have encouraged the Cretans to believe that he did not think much of them, and to this day some of them do believe that. They say that he spoke Greek badly, that Mackenzie was always at hand to act as his spokesman, or that Manolaki the foreman would pass on his orders. He did not want, they say, to speak Greek; he gave the impression of despising it. Probably he spoke as well as any of the travellers whom the local people will compliment warmly on command of the language. But then it was in his nature to hold aloof from the country society. ‘They liked Pendlebury,’ said one cosmopolitan Cretan, drawing a comparison, ‘because he drank with them.’ Certainly it is impossible to imagine Evans sitting down at a café table to drink rakí with the village elders. Nor were the lunch parties in the Villa garden given for the benefit of the citizens of Herakleion. Most of the guests, said Manoli, were foreigners, French or Italian archaeologists, with one or two Greeks – a Vice-Consul, perhaps – who had acted in some official capacity.
Once an impression is given reasons will be discovered to account for it. Evans, said one Cretan acquaintance of mine, began his excavations at the time when Crete had won autonomy. ‘Under the Turks you were allowed to take out antiques – now suddenly you could take out only duplicates: this prejudiced him against the Greeks.’ Somebody else had heard a tale of a misadventure with brigands in the Peloponnese which had affected the great man’s feelings towards Greeks everywhere. Since Evans, after describing the obstacles put in his way earlier, wrote thankfully of ‘the new political circumstances’ which after the departure of the Turks had enabled him to buy the whole of the Knossos area it seems unlikely that he preferred the Ottoman rule. As for the story of the Peloponnesian brigands, so far as I know it is an invention. But other tales have more foundation.
There was, for instance, a moment in the 1920s when the Greek Government devised a simple form of devaluation. Any notes in circulation were cut in half (on another occasion a third was chopped off) and consequently became worth half their face value; customers watched wryly as shopkeepers brought out the scissors. An eyewitness (he was a boy at the time) has described the scene at Knossos.
Evans was sitting at one table and Mackenzie at another, ready to pay the workmen. Evans asked for a basin of water and a towel. He took a bundle of notes and tore it in half – then he washed his hands to show what he thought of Greek money. The men were angry and the cook – he was a Greek from Asia Minor – made a disturbance. Next day the foreman sacked him.
It is perfectly true that where taking antiques out of Greece was concerned Evans felt himself entitled to make his own laws. There was the case of the customs official at embarkation who asked him to open the parcel he was carrying. The story is famous; I have heard it from a dozen sources, on the last occasion from a Greek archaeologist.
I don’t myself believe there were antiques in the parcel, but anyway Evans refused to open it. The official began to insist. Evans simply took the parcel and threw it into the sea …
It is a fine ripe example of high-handedness – but a high-handedness not, I should have thought, aimed especially at the Greeks; his autocratic manner, all the more splendid for being expressed in so conclusive a way, was recognised in England too. It could, I know, be alarming. War and Occupation never made poor Manoli forget an occasion when he was a houseboy and on the way back from the bank some money was lost (the folder had slipped down behind the seat of the car); when I talked to him nearly thirty years afterwards he was a middle-aged man with children growing up, but he still shrank into himself at the memory. Even sophisticated people were intimidated. I know a Greek archaeologist, later internationally distinguished, who has confessed that in his early days when he spoke only a little English he was unnerved by his encounters with Evans.
But in general the Cretans, those of them with memories long enough to recall the grand days of exploration at Knossos, remained ready to see the joke. Old Kosti, describing his years as servant at the Villa, would launch without being asked into a story which for some reason had stuck in his mind. A bathroom prepared for the host was mistakenly occupied by a guest (it was John Forsdyke) who managed to drop the fresh tablet of soap; Evans, arriving for his bath and finding the piece on the floor, flew into a rage – and Kosti would mimic his master stamping, waving his arms and shouting. ‘He used to strike me, he used to take me by the shirt and shake me’; then, with wondering admiration, ‘a very strange man, a very strange man’. The physical violence is perhaps a myth, though one can imagine Evans threatening it. But nobody would question the authenticity of a remark often quoted by Kosti: ‘Only God can change my mind.’
Certainly the older people of Knossos never ceased to mourn the Evans régime, autocratic though it was. The explorer may not have fraternised with the villagers, but he observed the local rules; the end of the year’s dig would be duly celebrated by a glendi, a party for the workmen and their families. Do you have a glendi now? I asked – it was in the late fifties and the British School was excavating near the Palace. Heads were shaken, and in glum faces I could read regret over decline, the decay of a great age. The mimicry itself was never resentful. In moments of excited talk Evans used to scratch his head, running his hand furiously right to left through hair which never grew really thin. One of his former employees gave me a demonstration as amused as it was accurate.
Occasionally the stories had a touch of affection. When Evans was crossing the road from the Villa to the Palace the village children, little scampering boys, used to run to show him the coins they had picked up, a French centime, perhaps, or some tiny worn Italian piece. He would carry out a grave examination, reward the children – and leave them with their treasure. Next day the same boys would dart up, the same exercise would be performed; amiably he refrained from pointing out that the coins were the ones he had already seen. I remember once pressing Spiro Vasilakis for an honest opinion. What was Evans really like? ‘He was good,’ said Spiro, his humorous lanky face with its dark moustache smiling. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Tell me the truth.’
‘Eh,’ said Spiro, ‘to me he was good.’
One must not think of Evans as a dry man. He had time for friendship. ‘I had a very sad arrival here,’ he writes from Knossos in 1925.
When in Athens I received a telegram to say tha
t Mr Seager, a great friend of mine and an excellent explorer [Seager was responsible for excavations on the islands of Mochlos and Pseira] had been taken suddenly ill on the way from Egypt and landed in an unconscious state at Candia. With Mr Blegen of the American School I was so anxious to do everything possible that I took steps to get a despatch boat given by the Greek Government – which they would have done – to take over the best doctor in Athens, but before anything could be done we received news of his death and arrived at Candia just in time for the funeral. … It was a very impressive public one in which the Government as well as the local authorities took part and we finally laid him in the little English cemetery on this side of Candia, beside British officers that he had known. He had just taken a little house near here and it is a great loss.
Cretans who remember the occasion have described the funeral procession with Evans getting out of the carriage to walk bareheaded behind the coffin; he felt the death, they said, deeply. The request to the Greek Government is characteristic not only of the man himself but of the decent international relations of the period. But his last tribute to Seager is all his own. ‘He was the most English American I have ever known.’
In family relations Evans was warm, and despite the emphasis on the business of archaeology the long letters home find space for fun. The handwriting slanting and angular on the heavily black-edged paper which after the death of his wife he always used (‘for protective colouring’, says Joan Evans mischievously), the first page often boldly intersected, crossed by lines written at right angles (even the richest Victorians hated to waste a fresh piece of paper on a concluding sentence), they are observant, ironic, gay; to Joan, over forty years younger than himself, often likeably affectionate. There is a nice sensibility in his condolences on the death of her friend Miss Jourdain (one of the two authors of An Adventure, the account of ghostly apparitions in the gardens of Versailles). ‘I am so glad that you were able to get some flowers at Youlbury – it is like having friends instead of hirelings. But I am so sorry for you.’ Any asperity in his nature was softened when he wrote to his half-sister.
But the asperity was there. It showed itself in reaction to criticism and especially in the long quarrel with Wace, excavator after Schliemann at Mycenae, who held fundamentally different views about the sources of the great creative period of Minoan culture – a quarrel which was to trumpet on long after the death of both protagonists. It showed itself in comments on Mackenzie, who had been a tireless and faithful assistant since the first year of the Knossos discoveries but whose constitution a quarter of a century later was understandably beginning to falter under the strain of the long Cretan summers, the interminable detail of archaeological excavation and the terrifying energy of his employer.
Poor Mr Mackenzie is still very shaky from the ’flu that he had in January last. He drinks warmed bottled beer and reposes most of the time – going down to the site however now on his donkey. He told me that the nightingales (who now sing all night here and most of the day) had given him a ‘set-back’! I really don’t know what to do with all his hypochondria. I did stir him up once by saying that if he did not mend I could take no further responsibility for him and must send him to a nursing home! He walks with a slouch, stoop and stumble as if he was 95 at least. On the top of that he has a quite healthy appetite – but goes to bed immediately after dinner.
The date of the letter is the Greek Easter of 1926. Evans himself was not indeed ninety-five, but he was close on seventy-five. He still seemed immortal. That summer there was one of the earthquakes which periodically set Crete and parts of Greece trembling. With the historic mystery of the destruction of the Palace of Minos always before him he was naturally fascinated by the phenomenon. A few years earlier (it was in 1922) he had written to Joan:
Most curious has been the evidence of a great earthquake at the end of MMIII [Middle Minoan III, 1800–1550 B.C. in Evans’s system of dating] which threw Palace blocks over smaller houses and crushed them with their fall … To celebrate this discovery we had a little earthquake here. The house rocked and rumbled and a traction engine seemed to lumber over the garden. No damage however was done, though the cook was nearly thrown over backwards.
The 1926 earthquake was a more serious affair, but he still preserved his scholarly detachment.
It was a very interesting experience, the earthquake as, curiously enough, I had been specially taken up lately with the effects of earthquakes on Minoan Knossos, which must have been as much a centre of them as medieval and modern Candia where on an average about two serious ones occur every century. As the last really good specimen occurred in 1856 I had strongly felt that one was overdue and even warned a lady here to expect one before the end of June! She and her husband had to rush out in their nightgowns into the streets of Candia – where a great deal of damage was done but it was a great piece of good fortune that it occurred at a comparatively early hour when most people were about – our two clocks stopped at 9.20 pm. I myself was lying undressed on my bed reading – and reflecting on my chances archaeologically, with cheerful effect … as my bed is in a basement corner of a very strongly built house – for the Villa Ariadne has walls a yard thick – I elected to stay where I was, tho’ the rocking brought down things in the room and a full pail of water on the floor was half splashed out. It was so like a ship at sea and though the shock did not last more than a minute I began to feel squeamish by the end. Earth sickness is a new complaint!
Less phlegmatic (and not having retired early to the basement), the rest of the party in the house, Piet de Jong, Forsdyke and the historian H. R. Hall ‘rushed out, passing the heavy stone table dancing on the terrace and dodging past the trees, that rocked as if they would fall, to the open … Things kept falling about, the whole house groaning and creaking and a deep roaring sound coming out of the depths.’ When Evans finally emerged ‘a great cloud of dust had risen, at first obscuring the full moon, and some lights from the village reflected on this gave the impression of a conflagration shrouded in smoke’. Near the garden gate children were rescued from the wreck of a small house. Some of the hill villages round Knossos were almost entirely destroyed. In Candia itself the damage was not only to houses but to the Museum which held the archaeological finds.
But the Villa Ariadne survived.
And something else. ‘Hurrying down with the others … to the site of the Palace, I was glad to find that the reconstituted upper storeys had resisted the shocks.’ That was lucky, for 1926 was the year in which Evans finally handed over in trust his Cretan estate, including the Palace site itself with its stairways and corridors, its colonnades and halls, its magazines, its terraces, its courts, its throne-room, all the vast works of restoration which had accrued in a quarter of a century. Possibly the Director and the Committee of the British School, which now became the guardian of Knossos, felt an occasional twinge of nerves. After all the next earthquake might not delay for half a century. It might happen in a year’s time and bring down the whole structure of the Palace. But the transfer of responsibility was the obvious course.
The School was honoured and grateful. The gift was splendid. It included, outside the perimeter of the Palace, olive groves and vineyards; it included the Villa Ariadne itself, encircled by shady gardens. Generosity did not stop there: Evans gave also an ‘invested endowment for maintenance and for the salary of a resident Curator’. It was natural and right that Mackenzie, for so long the worker in the field and, in spite of his ‘hypochondria’, Evans’s right-hand man in exploration and research, should be appointed to the post.
Twenty years after its building, then, the Villa entered on a new life. Evans had often filled it with scholars and architects whose studies were predominantly concerned with Knossos. During his régime they had been his guests, his co-workers. Now the house became an outpost of the British School at Athens. Students would pay, just as they paid in the Athens School hostel, for bed and board, and would share a sitting-room and a dining-room. Evans
’s servants stayed on – Kosti as cook, Maria as cleaning woman; and Manolaki Akoumianakis, for some years permanent foreman of the Knossos dig, would come from his house in the village when he was needed. Excavation, after all, did not come to a dead stop. Forsdyke records that Manolaki, ‘inspecting with the eye of an agriculturist the waste upper slopes which he had bought … noticed a hewn face of stone which he at once recognised as belonging to the diadromos of a chamber tomb’. Manolaki may not have been, like that earlier foreman, ‘the most expert tomb-hunter of the Levant’, but he was pretty smart at the game. Evans immediately excavated the grave, which proved to be part of a cemetery; he then turned over all the material to Forsdyke, who continued the exploration in the following year. It was 1927, and Humfry was having a first experience of field work. The cemetery where he was digging was of an early Greek period – from the protogeometric to the orientalising period in archaeological terms, tenth to seventh century BC. Evans, who had excavated one of the tombs years earlier, now not only handed over to the young archaeologist all the relevant photographs and drawings but made ‘a generous contribution towards the cost of publishing some of the vases in colour’. It was not the last of his benefactions. At the lower end of the garden where it abutted on the road from Candia (by now it was generally called Herakleion) there was the small house which I have earlier called a lodge. I think it had once been a tavern; at any rate it had long been known as the Taverna. In 1928 he renovated the building ‘so as to provide one single and one double bedroom, a sitting-room, and workroom, kitchen etc., below, for the use, at any time, of members of the School independently studying the antiquities of the spot’. The School now had its own annex to the Villa, and Evans had added to his debtors the long list of students and visitors who were to stay in the cool, quiet, owl-haunted enclosure.