by Dilys Powell
But my thankfulness at the general success of the occasion outweighed everything else, and when after riding a short distance with us on the running-board (in the direction, naturally, of his vineyard) Kosti stood at the curve of the road, once again waving till we were out of sight, I felt a shade of sadness – the chill, perhaps, of a farewell which might not be repeated.
The money had been divided between the two beneficiaries in the proportion, according to their respective wages at the Villa, of three for Kosti and two for Maria. The old lady, however, was grateful enough for the pair of them. The news of our arrival spread quickly through Katalagari, and from nowhere a figure appeared who turned out to be her son. Maria herself, we were told when we had climbed the stairs and settled, all four of us, among the flowering plants on the balcony, was dressing. Meanwhile the family, beaming now that their grievances were to be redressed, crowded in on us; the handsome daughter, so bitter at our earlier encounter, smiled among the anonymous press of excited women, and a curiosity of little boys peered from behind skirts or edged, whispering loudly, up the wooden stairs. Presently Maria, engulfed in black skirts and shawls, emerged from some inner darkness. She appeared to be chuckling; she remembered, apparently, an earlier meeting with Joan Evans. But when? For in 1935, after all, the visitor had not reached Crete. Ah, much earlier than that; and amid general applause it was disclosed that she recalled seeing Joan as a girl when with her mother – Arthur Evans’s stepmother – she had come out to the island before the First War.
With this background of reminiscence the function went famously. Once again I was frequently stopped as I read out the list of donors. But this time it was for a different reason. Maria would listen attentively. Then ‘How are Mrs Pendlebury’s children?’ she would ask: or ‘Mr Hutchinson, is he well?’ And the old creased face looked out from its black headscarf with infinite goodwill. Saying Thank You is not a matter of instinct. It has to be learned. Rustic society does not always learn, and sometimes in country districts of Greece one is uncertain whether or not a gift has been welcomed. This family left us in no doubt; and in a celebratory mood and with a happy conviction of having done the right thing we went back to the car, Joan and I each carrying a bottle of Maria’s home-grown tsikoudhiá.
It was in character that Joan Evans should not forget a third faithful servant of the Villa Ariadne. Manoli was, as she rightly put it, a bit in danger of being left out, and when I had been enquiring about Kosti and Maria I had intercepted some meaning looks between him and Ourania. He still had his job. But he must not be allowed to feel neglected; she would go and see him. In the gathering dusk we drove to Knossos. I had been able to give warning of her visit, and we were expected in the Villa kitchen. Ourania had tidied the room, Manoli had shaved and put on a clean white shirt. Hands were kissed, refreshments offered; at once gratified and self-respecting, in conversation and bearing our hosts gave a display of faultless manners.
‘I feel’, Joan said as we were on our way back to Herakleion, ‘that Manoli will be our next responsibility.’
For the moment, however, it seemed that he was safe.
There was one more name for her to remember – Akoumianakis. That evening the square outside the Astir Hotel and the neighbouring church was crowded. Thinly cheered, a Deputy, a former Minister, was visiting Herakleion. Half a dozen black saloon cars drove round in a circle, and I could see huge rings of bread, ritually tied with ribbon, changing hands. A gathering less formal but perhaps livelier and friendlier was held when Joan and her party entertained to dinner Micky, son of that brave steward who had died fighting in the Battle of Crete.
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When in 1962 I was hearing about the excitements of the Cretological Congress there were workmen in the Villa garden. They were digging foundations – digging them, I saw, where once John and Hilda Pendlebury had fondly laid out their hard tennis court. I asked what was going on. A museum, I was told; we are building a museum. Munificent help from Joan Evans and from another Philhellene and friend of British archaeology, Marc Fitch, had enabled the School at last to afford a Stratigraphic Museum. And four years later Joan, with Marc Fitch in support, was once again in Crete to declare the Museum open.
A letter from her written next day describes an occasion both ceremonial and celebratory – exorcism by the village priest with ‘no bell, but book, candle, icon, live coal, holy water and an aspergil of rosemary’; speeches; the ritual cutting of a garland; holy water sprinkled throughout the Museum; and a feast with champagne for the visitors and the traditional sheep for the villagers. Sinclair Hood, defender of the Evans name in the Linear B controversy, was there; so were a number of Greek archaeological officials and such local personalities as the Chief of Police. Peter Megaw, who now with his wife Elektra had succeeded Sinclair in occupation of the Director’s house in Athens, translated the English speeches into Greek. The great days of Evans were represented as well as mortality would allow. Piet de Jong came to recall them, and the company included, Joan said, more of her brother’s former workmen than one would have believed possible. Even Kosti had survived; a car was sent for him and, tottering a bit, he arrived with bunches of flowers, wild Cretan tulips and scarlet anemones, for his benefactress; Micky too was there, a representative for his dead father.
The Greek Archaeological Service had equipped and furnished the Museum; it was an agreeably Anglo-Greek day. And at last the Knossos collection of sherds – among them those which John Pendlebury had found ‘labelled in pencil on worm-eaten wood … by a Greek foreman’ – had been taken from their storage place in the magazines beneath the Palace of Minos and properly housed. It was sixty-six years from the day when Evans had begun digging. It was sixty years since he had built his house. Another stage had been reached in the life of the Villa Ariadne.
i
CERTAINLY HERAKLEION had changed in the five years since I had last seen it. Now in 1971 concrete buildings were going up along the road from the airport. Olympic Airways had a new terminal in Liberty Square, and the Square itself had assumed the air of the centre of a provincial capital. In King Constantine Avenue the shops were a good deal more productive than I remembered, and enquiring tentatively about a replacement for a raincoat I had lost I was rushed into a store-room from which I emerged with some kind of protective covering in hideous blue nylon. On August 25 Street tourism had left pockmarks. Rent A Car, said the notices over the travel and shipping agencies on the way down to the harbour, Rent A Boat, Take A Tour, Buy Greek Popular Art.
From the friendly Astir Hotel I went up the hill, past the Lion Fountain and the traffic policeman at the junction, and into the market. It looked neater and cleaner. Perhaps it was, or perhaps the impression was due to the introduction of such doubtful amenities as detergents and plastic buckets. Perhaps also there were more shirts and shoes, hats, spectacles and sweaters. The rest, though the variety seemed greater, offered the traditional kaleidoscope, bank after bank of cherries, apricots, oranges, beetroot, cucumbers, strawberries, beans, courgettes, olives, melons, almonds, peppers, carrots, aubergines, medlars and apples, with here and there a basket of eggs, a pile of cheeses, hunks of raw meat dangling in a row from hooks, and a shop-counter loaded with bread; everywhere the warm smell of coffee from the beans roasting on the turning machines. The wealth of the earth: no supermarket has such a look of plenty. The succession of stalls had scarcely altered. The colour of the evening air was the colour I had seen in Herakleion year after year; nowhere else is dusk as blue. To my relief – for a moment as I turned a corner I could not see the name – something else was unchanged. Evans Street was still Evans Street.
Next day when I went to the Museum I saw a handsome boulevard where I remembered only chaos, and as I crossed the road to the entrance I was nearly run over by an unexpected rush of traffic. My visit had coincided with the arrival in the harbour of a couple of cruise ships, and I struggled in on the tail of parties of Americans and Germans. Polyglot, the voices of the lecturers battled f
or a hearing. With a great sliding and clopping of shoes and sandals one party would trail on to another room and re-form in front of another show-case; and dodging between the groups I edged in to look at an ivory; a bull’s head with inlaid eyes; a vase from Zakros, its handle a curve of rock-crystal beads; or the huge photographic enlargement of some Minoan seal. A group of watercolours, too, I remembered, Piet de Jong’s vision of the Palace of Minos before its ruin, with pillars and stairways unbroken and unblotched and the frescoes – the flying fish, the figure-of-eight shields – bright and new on the walls.
The bus station in a turning off August 25 Street was new to me, though the waiting-room with its bundles of luggage and the counter for coffee was of the familiar kind. The bus westward towards Rethymnon and Canea was due to start and indeed did start at eight in the morning. But the man at the ticket-desk advised me to wait until eight-fifteen and take the express bus.
‘You will get there first,’ he urged.
Perhaps we did. At any rate one was spared numerous stops at villages. We scurried at a great pace along the way out of Herakleion taken by the captors of General Kreipe; and with the new road-surface and an up-to-date machine we reached Canea in less time than it had once taken a private car. Souda Bay was empty; not so much as a caïque in sight where the battered British ships had burned and sunk in 1941; and Canea itself, once the last stronghold of the German garrison, was a dusty, commercial town busy with traffic.
An hour’s drive away on the high plain of Omalos a cold wind ruffled green crops. A Greek Alpine Society sign pointed the way to the crests of the encircling White Mountains. At the far end of the plain a little Tourist Pavilion was plastered against the cliffs where the long descent began to the Samaria Gorge and the pass to Hagia Roumeli and the sea. Chance had brought me there on the anniversary of the Allied evacuation of Crete. Next morning as I went down the Gorge, airless and damp with the threat of rain, I thought how thirty years earlier to the very day the last of the British and Commonwealth troops had been struggling over hot waterless hillsides to Sphakia, a little to the east of Hagia Roumeli, some of them to embark for Egypt, others to find no room in the ships, only the order to surrender – and to begin next afternoon under guard the penitential march back.
Myles Hildyard was in that company, and the Omalos plain it was which after his escape sheltered and fed him. But now the pastoral life went on undisturbed. Only a plaque set in the rock-face on the road down to Canea commemorated the death of a Greek and a New Zealander, members of the Resistance who were killed in a fight with German troops in February 1944; and at Alikianos people will show you a memorial chapel with a glass case full of terrible relics – the bones of massacred Cretans whose bodies were found in a field behind its border of trees.
In the Amari valley peace had settled still more gratefully than at Omalos. I could not afford the time for the slow perambulation of my first visit, twelve years earlier, so I hired a car with a driver at Rethymnon. Anyway I could not have recognised the stopping-places. Smooth roads curled round the flanks of the hills. Villages once no more than a few hovels were now tidy groups of tidy houses. The soft leafy beauty which had enchanted Tom Dunbabin had long gone. Even the ramshackle charm which I remembered – the occasional patches of overgrown garden, the vine coiling up the outside stairway – was missing; everything was characterless, or so it seemed at first under the fringed clouds of that overcast day. For the visitor there was a shade of melancholy. But I wrenched my thoughts back to the condition of the inhabitants. They, wherever I talked, were content.
I had no luck at Yerakari, where I had slept in the house of the village President. Poor George Akoumianakis himself, I knew, was dead, and the gentle old uncle who had taken me on his donkey to Ano Meros, he too was gone, and the schoolmaster Kokonas, friend of the British in the war. But I had hoped to find Mrs Akoumianakis. In vain: a little bunch of women collected to give me the news.
‘Ah, Evangelia – she has been ill, she has gone to Athens for a cure. She entertained you long ago? What a pity you have missed her. And her husband, you know about her husband – he did, you know, a great deal for the village. It is sad for her without him.’
At Ano Meros I was more fortunate. In another village I had heard news of the warrior-priest. He is ageing, somebody said. No, no, said somebody else, he is still tough. I told my driver to pull up at a café. The priest, I said, Kyriakos Katsandonis, where is his house? Then I remembered the track up the hill. A fine house, said one of the bystanders. Certainly it looked grander than the picture in my mind from my first visit twelve years ago; and when I was entertained there on my second visit it was too dark to see.
This time a dog was grumbling amiably from a verandah at the top of the flight of wooden steps. A woman came out: Mrs Katsandonis; then an imposing bearded figure in tall priest’s hat. He did not recognise me. But when I mentioned my talisman, Tom, he remembered. Thank you, I said as I sat down in the room where we had drunk toasts to Churchill and Paddy Leigh Fermor, thank you, I will not eat anything, I have a long way to go and I can’t stay; I came only to greet you and to bring you a book. In that distant past – though to me it seemed like yesterday – I had promised one of Paddy’s books, and now I laid it on the table. He looked puzzled. Then ‘Ah, Philadem!’ he cried, pleased – though I suspect that reading English was a lost accomplishment. The dog sat at my feet, beaming. From the kitchen Mrs Katsandonis called to it not to worry me.
‘Leave him,’ said her husband, ‘she is stroking him.’ Then to me: ‘He is a Bulgarian dog, my son sent him to me from Bulgaria.’
Once more I went round the photographs on the walls – Kyriakos in the Middle East in the war, Kyriakos with the King of the Hellenes, Kyriakos on some recent ecclesiastical occasion with a proud-looking hieratic group. The room had a self-satisfied air. When I made to leave Mrs Katsandonis came in with a plate of almonds. I took one. No, no, you must take them all, she said.
‘All, all,’ said Kyriakos. ‘You have eaten nothing, they are for you. They come from the woods up the hill at the back, they have a very special flavour.’
As I went down the track again he stood with his wife on the verandah. They raised their hands in gestures of farewell, and beside them the dog waved a valedictory tail. Looking back at the powerful, Michelangelesque figure in the high black hat, I had the feeling that I had received a plate of almonds from the hands of the Almighty.
We drove to Nithavris under skies softly threatening rain, not like that crystal evening when I had first looked down on the village and taken fright at the thought of crossing Mount Ida the next day. There was a tarred road where I had once toiled along on the back of a donkey. The café where we pulled up might have been the one where I waited, shivering and listening to the talk about a shepherd’s crook, but I should not have known it. Elias Voskakis, I said, not very hopefully, to a trio of men sitting at a table, do you know where I can find Elias Voskakis? They turned towards the slope behind them.
‘Voskakis!’ they shouted. ‘Elias Voskakis! Somebody is looking for you!’ And to me: ‘He is coming, he is coming.’
I looked where they pointed. Coming down the slope with its rough stone steps was a man with a neat round head, the cropped dark hair turning grey. He wore a waistcoat over shirt-sleeves, a stud at the collarless neck, trousers in place of the breeches and high boots I remembered. By the hand he led a tiny boy with neat round dark head, a miniature of himself.
‘I knew you as soon as I saw you,’ he said. Then, proudly and lovingly, ‘This is my grandson.’
In his house we held a reunion – his children, his grandchild, the cousin who on that first anxious evening had joined in the discussion about the chances of reaching Anoyia in a day; only Elias’s wife was away, working in the fields, and I had without seeing her to leave the present I had brought. It was a sweater in a colour not, I trusted, too bright for life in an Amari village. I hope it will suit her, I said.
‘It will suit he
r, it will suit her.’ The cousin brushed aside feminine doubts. It would, he implied, have to suit her, and that was the end of the matter. And he urged me to eat more of the cheese and the slices of cucumber which had been brought, while Elias poured tsikoudhiá from an enormous bottle.
‘You sent me’, he remarked placidly, ‘a lighter to replace the one which I threw away on the walk. I thank you.’
It was the first I had heard of its arrival; I had forgotten all about sending the thing. Now I remembered something else. His daughter, a pretty girl, dark like him, fresh-faced like her mother, was married, she was a mother herself. Was it you, I asked, who broke the clock that night I stayed in this house?
She had not forgotten. ‘Yes,’ she said, laughing, ‘Father was very angry.’ I myself could recognise the furniture in the room where we were sitting. Something, though, was missing – the photograph of Elias with wings of fiery, frizzy hair. ‘I don’t know’, he said, a little abashed by the reminder of youthful vanity, ‘what has happened to it.’ The family was still hospitable, still solicitous. But the past was fading. Once proud of his own strength, Elias was proud now of the strength to come. The boy who had climbed week after week over Mount Ida, who had carried dangerous messages, run under fire, suffered a bullet-wound in his hand, was a village elder now, gentle, quiet, living in the promise of his children. The hazards and the heroics were blurred. The Amari valley was reverting to its position as a refuge from a harsh outside world. Perhaps it was still Lotus-Land.
All the same I was glad not to be setting off again over Ida; glad to be travelling back to Herakleion with its bustle and its warmth and its urban lights piercing the cobalt blue haze of evening.