During the years Steven and Vicki have been friends of ours, we’ve heard stories of this intense family. The bullet that made the hole in the Náfplio church was fired at the new president of Greece by Petrobey’s brothers because Petrobey and other relatives had been imprisoned in Náfplio when they opposed this first president of the new independent Greece. All it takes is a day’s drive through the mountains to see how conquering the Mani would be impossible. Pirates and slave traders frequently raided this area, and the Maniots were not opposed to those activities from time to time themselves. The terrain speaks of isolation, individualism, privation, and xenophobia. Ferocious defenders of their freedom and dreamers of liberty, way in the Mani, they also must dream of green beans and peas.
Our Mavromihalis clan, most peaceful and charming of humans, we find by the pool at the hotel. Vicki’s family lives an hour north, and they’ve come down from her home place this morning with their four children. Steven and Vicki live near us in Marin, where they have important lives and careers and hundreds of friends. But they passionately love their Greek heritage, and they are giving their children the great gift of a home in this world. Already the three older children, eight, six, and three, speak Greek fluently. They think it’s funny to teach us ένας, δύο, τρείς, énas, thío, tris, one, two, three. They talk to baby Constantine in Greek, and probably he already understands. Last year Steven and Vicki bought a grove over the sea and are planning to restore a house. Every year they travel to Greece at least twice. Steven is a car buff, and last year they flew to France, where he bought a classic Deux Chevaux, one of those hump-backed vintage Renaults, and the entire family drove all across Europe to Greece. Some might consider that a journey into hell, but they had fun. They always do. Their family life warms anyone who’s around them because all the children enjoy each other. They joke and sing and hold hands when they walk. “How did you do this?” I’ve asked the parents so often. “Why aren’t they whining and fighting?”
“They know the family is a team,” Steve says. But really, they know they are cherished and appreciated, and the atmosphere of mutual respect in this family feels palpable. I once heard someone say that the best thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother. In Steven’s case that must be easy. Vicki shines with intelligence as brightly as with beauty, a clear open face, black eyes, and a smile that makes you see what she looked like as a nine-year-old. Steven, too, remains the boy who studied fencing and went to the Olympics for Greece. His enthusiasm and simpatico personality will always keep him vibrant. A top real estate agent, he continues to study history and philology, often teaching courses at Stanford and Berkeley. Vicki has put aside her work as an attorney for a while and guards the time she spends with her children, Franco, Nikki, and Georgia, followed by Constantine, who is about to be baptized. Now “this girl’s through,” according to Vicki. What beauties. From one legend springs the source of the clan’s beauty: an early Mavromihalis wed a mermaid. I have an Irish runaway priest and nun in my ancestry, but this pales in comparison to a mermaid in the bloodline.
Steven points over the wall to a few stark marble graves by the sea. “Old Petrobey’s buried down there.” We tell him we’ve seen the family home in the village. While the children read and rest, Ed and I drive down the coast road and find a place to scramble over the rocks for a dip in the sea.
We meet for dinner in Areopolis, named for Ares, god of war. Formerly the town was called Tsimova but was renamed to honor Petrobey Mavromihalis. This whole area was fighting mad. A male child was known as a “gun.” The town has sunk into a summer torpor, the lanes deserted, a few cats asleep in the plateia, the town square. Steven takes us to a family friend’s restaurant, and he’s given a hero’s welcome. We begin to understand how Steven’s surname resonates in Mani. Dinner goes on and on. “Nikki, did anyone ever tell you that you look exactly how Jacqueline Kennedy must have looked at six? If they make a movie, we’re recommending you for the part,” Ed teases. She has been told, and it’s true. She has a rare presence and elegance, odd words for a child. Franco, the oldest, makes jokes. He has a vulnerability about him, a goodness that shines, and Georgia just exudes some kind of golden-haired girlishness that calls up the Greek word archetype. Constantine, a baby still, observes all and somehow looks wise beyond his years. By all rights, this late he should be screaming, but instead paws his bread and looks at his siblings as though to say, Just wait, I’ll join you in a moment.
We’re looking over plans for the new house and trading stories about permits and workers. The waiter begins playing games with the children, who are unfazed by dinner beginning at ten P.M. He finally walks them over to the plateia and buys them ice cream. He’s obviously having a fine time, and they are too. Are they just enchanted children, or could this happen to anyone? Kaliníkhta, good night, they call.
The family is busy with arrangements in the morning, so we drive to Váthia and other villages around Areopolis to look at the characteristic Mani towers. We pass more jutting stone and prickly pear, tiny roads, and villages of stone towers crawling up sheer walls and chopped out of rock. For miles we see no one. No car. Nothing. Ah, a baby donkey—sign of life. In a few places old men are playing the same cards they play all over Europe. Roads narrow to rough paths. May the tires hold up. Nowhere else on earth looks like this, so the mind must adjust to the tower mentality, what the tower meant to them, the duty of the male to build his family a tower, the life inside the tower. The tower reflects who they were—and to some extent still are. Steven says that among the two hundred arriving for the baptism, six or seven Mavromihalis families have not spoken to each other in three hundred years. I hope no vendetta erupts.
As a traveller devouring a place for only a short time, the impossibility of developing a profound view bothers me. But sometimes you find a book, a book that so thrills you by its scope and love that your own disappointment dissolves with each page. Such a book is Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Published in 1958, Mani records a trip he made on foot, by bus, and by boat all around this area. He and his companion, Joan, camped and depended on the kindness of strangers. He does not hesitate to depart into discursive essays on whatever interested him. I think he would have a hard time publishing this brilliant book in this age of the short attention span. He tells all; he’s a cataloguer, an ecstatic, and his prose style makes few compromises with the ignorance of his reader. This is one of my favorite books. I did not get to go inside a Mani tower, but through Fermor’s description I know what it’s like to have dinner on top, the table hauled up by rope, and to sleep there catching any breeze under the stars. He describes descending, floor by floor, by ladders, each lower floor cooled more by the one above.
Although I hope Steven someday will write his own book about his family, Fermor conveys vividly the Mavromihalis heritage. They reached the pinnacle of their power, riches, and influence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and part of the reason for their hold on the Mani was their base at Limeni, a considerable harbor and the feasible gateway into Laconia and the rest of the Mani. He describes Petrobey’s fine looks, great dignity, and gracious manners, which were “outward signs of an upright and honorable nature, high intelligence, diplomatic skill, generosity, patriotism, unshakable courage and strength of will: qualities suitably leavened by ambition and family pride and occasionally marred by cruelty.” Minus the last, these qualities perfectly describe Steven. Petrobey, Fermor writes, “soars far beyond the rocky limitations of these pages into those of modern European history.”
Scattered about the landscape, sometimes with almost perfect camouflage, the Byzantine churches are exciting to come upon. In Nomia, in Kitta, in lanes, and half hidden in the hills, these organic, sublime little Byzantine churches dot the landscape. They’re one room in size with a curved apse. Often they’re locked. They look made of mud with bricks stuffed in, or they’re made of square stones, each one outlined in brick. One has an evil eye on a stone, one a shell; many are decora
ted around the door with bits of carved leaves and vines from other structures. Through a tiny window or keyhole, we can see sections of frescoes of horses or cool icons of Mary inside. So different from the Italian Mary, she looks remote, as though she is exercising Olympian disdain. Religion must have felt as stony as everything else in the land. The architecture gives me joy. A goat munching grass outside the smallest church in the world just looks at us as if to say, What did you expect?
We drive to the bottom of the peninsula, a camel-saddle of land with the sea on either side. A powerful zone—in the ancient world, Cape Taínaron was the entrance to hell. Pirates raged for centuries, not only raiding ships of their goods but taking crews and selling them for slaves all over the Mediterranean. My American education about slave trading was woefully inadequate. I thought there was a one-way route from Africa to the American South. Every southern soul carries memories of the slave ships. They’re never bound for Italy or Turkey, always Savannah or Charleston. How naïve. As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward. You would think the tension of that string that connects the two is such that I’d hear a strong snap, perhaps while taking a short nap on some slow Einsteinian bus over the mountains.
We gather at the church in Areopolis. In the courtyard Petrobey and his seven thousand allies had their weapons blessed at the beginning of their expedition to Kalamata. Now an American son has brought back his boy for a baptism in the ancestral font. Before the ceremony the children pass around glass dolphin favors for all the guests. We crowd into the church—my god the temperature, we’re going to expire—and the priests in their beards and robes begin to chant. I’m woozy. A fresco above depicts an infant baptism in the same font. Constantine is joining a long line of babies who achieve new life in an ancient place. He looks confident, then perturbed as his neat suit is stripped away and he is lowered naked into a vat of olive oil. I mean lowered, not just dipped. He’s submerged, and when lifted aloft flailing and dripping, he screams like one of the Turks his ancestors offed. We’re swaying in the powerful incense and the scents of sweat that must arise mostly from the robes of the priests. We have travelled many miles to feel the life of this child surge forward into his heritage.
The feast begins. Tables are laid on the rooftop of the hotel, some glimmer of the experience of family occasions on top of a tower. Constantine, no longer dazed, is passed from arm to arm. He seems to know this is all about him. I have never seen so many black mustaches, woolly beards, rampant eyebrows that run together. The dancing begins, and the music that will play all night serenades the grave below of Petrobey Mavromihalis. The full moon casts a marmoreal light on the sea. Vicki stars. She knows all the dances. I’m reminded of our Italian friends who say, “You’re more Italian than we are.” She’s as lovely as a goddess in her green dress. She dances with Steven, who ends on his knees, leaning backward. He then dances with each of his girls. People perform solo dances such as “The Drunken Man.” The departure from tradition comes when a woman performs this heretofore male prerogative. She staggers and lurches as everyone applauds wildly. Apparently the old warring factions are dining together. We jolt out of our seats when gunfire goes off. The relatives are packing heat. They blast off round after round into the sky. Children dance; the son of the former prime minister, more gorgeous than any of the gods he has replaced, dances with his girlfriend, who is dressed in a short beach wrap. We meet Mavromihalises from all over Mani. Few of the dances involve couples. Circles and conga lines form, and everyone, even the ancients, join in. Steven gives a welcome toast and speaks eloquently about his family’s love of Greece and the importance in their lives of their Greek families. The band plays mostly Greek music but then launches into “What a Wonderful World,” with the magnificent line “bright blessed days and dark sacred nights.” Tomorrow we drive back to Athens and fly home to Italy. We always will remember this dark sacred night deep in the Mani.
Among Friends
Scotland
My friends are my estate.
—EMILY DICKINSON
“Looks like the quintessential Scottish house.” Ed pulls up to the forecourt of a square-cut gray stone house, two stories, with small-paned windows and wings jutting off to the sides. As we rounded the bend on the bumpy dirt road, I glimpsed a terrace and sloping garden on the other side of the house. A Scottie dog looks placed by central casting beside the great white front door. Gigantic trees shade the grounds. From a stable across the driveway, a tiny donkey comes out to see what’s up.
We’re last to arrive. Two small cars already are parked. The dog barks, the donkey begins to hee-haw, and Kate opens the door. Robin and Susan are right behind her. My three oldest friends from my California life.
“Where have you been?”
“We thought you’d run into a firth.”
“How was the flight?”
“Down, Trumpet. Isn’t he adorable? He’s staying with the caretaker.” Robin points to a small house down a lane. The Scottie seems to be trying to embrace my leg.
“The house is amazing.”
“Amazing good or amazing bad?” I ask. Having had a few weird house rentals, I’m wary.
“Oh, good, but still amazing. You’ll see.” Kate obviously is relishing some surprise in store for me.
“We landed at noon, so along the way we stopped at a pub,” Ed explains. “The food was so-so. In the loo they sold Scotch-flavored condoms.”
“What’s this ‘loo’ already?” Robin’s husband, John, emerges and helps hoist my bag with its heavy tag. “Are you bringing Italian groceries in here?”
“Only olive oil. And of course, coffee.”
Susan’s husband, Cole, comes to the door. Someone should photograph him on the threshold, his characteristic dark purple silk shirt, silver hair pulled back into a tiny ponytail, the gray stone framing him.
“Have you shopped yet?” I ask. Food first.
“Did you all arrive at the same time?” We’re answering questions with questions.
“Want some tea?” Susan, a Londoner who has lived all her adult life in California, slips right back toward her roots.
Wellingtons line the flagged foyer. A flock of umbrellas, some with broken jutting spokes, fill a corner. “Come see the living room. What do you think?” Kate gestures around a generously proportioned room with long windows overlooking the garden. Flowered sofas flank the fireplace on either side of a large hassock table loaded with books. Cole and Robin will be happy: a grand piano fills one corner. Comfortable chairs upholstered in worn velvet, portraits, lamps—some with shades askew—and a venerable Oriental rug all confirm Ed’s original word, quintessential.
The dining-room table would seat twenty. The owners have left the silver candlesticks and lovely silver trays and coffee service on the sideboard. Such a contrast to our English Scrooge rental.
“You’ll love the kitchen,” Robin says. “It’s huge—fantastic for all of us to cook together.” The high-ceilinged kitchen is anchored by the immense creamy yellow Aga stove.
“It’s the size of our rental car.”
“And much heavier.” Ed opens the door to the simmering oven, then the hotter one. “Those little cars are made out of heavy-duty aluminum foil.”
“I’m excited—I’ve always read about the Aga and never have used one. It’s on all the time, isn’t it?”
Susan points out which areas on the surface are hot and demonstrates how to make toast with a screened gadget that you put bread in and rest on the heat. “We have to slow-roast something.”
“Seven-hour leg of lamb,” Ed suggests. “So it just stays hot all the time? This wouldn’t do in most climates, but it must be nice in this one.”
“The kitchen’s always cozy. Even in July the room feels nice and snug but not hot.”
“What fuels it, Suze?”
“The old ones used wood. This one is oil-fired, but it looks old. I think it has been retrofitted. You can even get electric ones. I guess the cast iron distrib
utes the heat well.”
A grand island with chopping-block top, an ample kitchen table, and a long counter all invite us to start stirring and mincing. Behind the sink, the wall is capriciously tiled in many colors.
They have given us the master bedroom and will hear no protests. In the adjacent bath Queen Victoria should be standing in the shower. The tall half-circle brass contraption sprays you all over as you bask in a mammoth porcelain tub. I can’t wait to bathe.
We get lost among the eight bedrooms, numerous other studies, a TV room, playroom, and larders. With seven of us—Kate’s fiancé didn’t come—a rambling house feels just right. I begin to see what was behind Kate’s enigmatic “good, but still amazing” as we explore.
“These figures of the Madonna are everywhere. Everywhere,” I notice. They all know of my collection of ex-voto objects and paintings of Mary, Mary Magdalen, and Jesus.
“Yes—paintings, ceramic figures, etched bottles, drawings—super kitsch.”
“Any needlepoint chair-bottoms?”
“I’m going to count the Marys,” Kate says.
Then Ed notices the TV screen in the room off the kitchen. “Look at this.”
An aquarium has been wedged behind the emptied picture opening.
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