Outside this semi-circle, however, all was rejoicing. Staidness evaporated on release and scores of young nomads were carousing under the branches in uninhibited and growing festivity. Squatting or standing among the wigwams, rings of geometrical women confabulated or sang together and there was even an exclusive little ellipse of dancing women. Some of the younger of these squaws had wooden cradles slung papoose-like on their backs, each containing a miniature swaddled nomad. Their songs had the same epic themes, laced with lament, as those of the men. The murmur of their talk was broken, again and again, with peals of laughter.
The Sarakatsánissas, usually so silent in the presence of men, look forward to weddings as their only chances of fun. The talk, as though preordained, takes on a bawdy turn of hair-raising frankness. None of the exciting, comic or absurd aspects of sex are left unexploited. Rhymes, anecdotes and reminiscences are eagerly repeated and capped, crone mumbles toothlessly to crone, wives gesturing like anglers make boastful and teasing claims about their married life, girls listen agog. Fits of laughter punctuate this scandalous chat, hands are flung in the air in hilarity, faces are covered in mock shame. All this goes on beyond male earshot, while, at a distance, their husbands and fathers and descendants smile indulgently at the seasonable ribaldry.
Nightfall had transformed the scene indoors. Late arrivals and one or two indefatigable ones were still at meat; the rest, lit now by scattered oil-dips, had lapsed into a semi-trance of wine and song. Our return with Uncle Petro evoked hospitable cries of greeting and invitation, repeated many times and driven home by the clashing of wine-tumblers, to stay the night, as it was so late; or for a week, a month or a year or forever, to forget London and take to the huts. Alas, some tiresome fixture in Alexandroupolis next morning compelled us to leave; so, after manifold farewells, we climbed the stairs to pay our respects to the bride in her hushed upper chamber.
The rushlight on a stool cast so dim a light that the group at the end was hard to discern. One of the seated bridesmaids, mown down by her vigil, was fast asleep where she sat; a nudge from her neighbour shook her blinking into line. None of the other tiring-women had moved and the bride had remained frozen for the hours since we had last seen her in the same posture of submission. The faint radiance robbed them all of a dimension. Darkly haloed by their interlocking shadows, they melted into the wall and their black and white figures assumed the aspect of a fresco, half-lit; here and there an earring, a coin, a bracelet, a ring or a necklace gleamed for a moment and dimmed again with the rise and fall of the wick like fragments of gilt or isolated gold tesserae in a mosaic. The bride silently bowed in answer to our farewells, the only one to move in this still and hagiographic troop of virgins and martyrs. We tiptoed out.
“Doesn’t she ever speak?” I asked Uncle Petro when we were out of doors.
“Not now,” he said.
“It’s rather sad, during her own wedding.”
“Ah! That’s the way it is....That’s as it should be.”
By the firelight, the scene out of doors assumed a Breugelish look. Dancers were still sedately moving in silhouette, a last spitted lamb was turning over a bed of glowing charcoal and groups of nomads reeled arm in arm and filled the night with loud voices and laughter. Overcome by wine or exhaustion, a few slept under the branches in disjointed attitudes as though snipers had laid them low in mid-career. A heroic, unsteady figure, egged on by his companions, was draining, with head and trunk flung back, the last dregs from an immense wicker-cradled demijohn. Empty, it fell with a thud and rolled away amid cheers. A flaxen-haired boy, bent double against a tree-trunk, vomited the day’s intake in a sombre gush. Chewing and snarling sheepdogs wrangled over bones. The huts, now softly lit from within by the glimmer of oil-dips and hearths, had become vague dark globes looming out of the night, and deeper still in the shadows we divined the presence of tethered horses. The singing grew fainter as we reached the railway line.
“You should have seen the weddings when I was a boy,” Barba Petro was saying, as the serpent of lighted train windows grew larger down the valley. “We used to set out on horseback a hundred strong to carry off the bride, firing off our guns as fast as we could load them. Dang! Dang! Boom! Boom! Dang!...Horses used to be lamed, people wounded, sometimes people actually got killed. Whereas now...”
The train had clanked to a standstill in the little halt. We were aloft once more among the anachronistic fringes and tassels of our Victorian carriage.
“Come to see us up in the mountains, up in the Rhodope!,” he shouted as the train began to move. “The plains are no good.” He pointed with his crook into the night. “In the Rhodope—”
The wheels drowned the rest. The light from the carriages flashed across his dwindling figure at faster intervals, and the glimmering huts and the fires and the tiny moving silhouettes behind him looked as strange now, and as alien to Europe, as a nomadic encampment in the steppes of Central Asia.
Who are these extraordinary people, and where do they come from? As in the case of the Greeks themselves, no one knows. All is problematical, starting with their name.[9] The first faint mention of them, in the pages of Eugenius the Aetolian, occurs in 1650, and everything before or since is folklore and surmise. Every symptom and every particle of evidence is circumstantial.
Western travellers, when confronted by nomads and hut-dwellers, have almost invariably set them down as “Wallachians,” or “Vlachs”; rightly, quite often. There are many thousands of these semi-nomadic Aroman people, migrating twice yearly between their villages and the plains, speaking a Latin language of their own which is closely akin to Rumanian, and as different from Greek as the Welsh language is from English. Theories about their origins abound, all of them hotly debated. To an uninitiated eye and ear, there are points of surface resemblance between the Vlachs and the Sarakatsáns. Both are nomads, hut-and-tent-dwellers, and shepherds; and the garb of the men, but not of the women, has something in common. The confusion among foreign travellers was probably furthered by the word “vlachos,” written with a small “v.” This word designates not only the Latin-dialect speaking Aromans, the “Koutzovlachs” proper, but it is loosely applied to shepherds generically all over Greece. In fact Greeks, if they want to make it clear that they are speaking of Vlachs, not merely of herdsmen in general, nearly always use the word “Koutzovlachs” (or “limping Vlachs”)—another promising subject of linguistic speculation—or, in the case of those whose Latin language is more mixed with Albanian than (as among the Koutzovlachs) with Greek, “Arvanitóvlachi,” or, more colloquially still, “Karagounides,” or “Black-Cloak Men.”[10] The Vlachs are much more numerous than the Sarakatsáns but less widespread; they played a prominent if minor part in Byzantine and Balkan history; they inhabit remarkable villages in the mountains and form the bulk of the population of several Macedonian and Thessalian towns; all this, with their difference of language and, some say, of race, from the rest of the Greeks, has been a fascinating anthill for linguists and ethnographers. For the last hundred and fifty years, unfortunately, they have been a theme of bitter political discord in the Balkans. These considerations, with the muddle over the word “vlach,” and the fact that the habitats of the Vlachs and the Sarakatsáns largely overlap, has edged the more reticent and fleeting Sarakatsáns ever deeper into a cloudy and unchronicled hinterland. Till almost yesterday they lived in a forgotten historical dell to which the paths were few and overgrown and finally, not there at all. It is only in recent decades that lone scholars have begun to ply their billhooks. The confusion between the two groups has never existed among the Greeks themselves; it is a foreign reserve. Indeed, under scrutiny, their dissimilarity pierces any surface resemblance more and more sharply. Everything—manners, customs, clothes, folklore, beliefs, appearance, feeling and, above all, language—thrusts them further apart.
Semi-nomadism exists all over Greece; shepherds leave their mountain villages in winter in search of lowland pastures free of snow; lowlanders d
o the reverse in summer. Among the true semi-nomads, the Vlachs, however, where village economy depends entirely on livestock, autumn brings about an exodus to the plains of the whole male population with all their flocks. They leave a skeleton population of women, children and old men behind to keep the home fires burning till their return to the mountains in spring. In winter, they live in huts in the plain, or, more and more, nowadays, in villages which have sprung up on the sites of their invariable winter sojourn. Alone among the pastoral people of Greece the Sarakatsáns have no fixed abode. They are, unlike the Vlachs, with the substantial villages and towns they have inhabited for centuries, entire nomads.
Apart from their wandering, they regard their summer pastures as their true home. The details of their life are formalized and codified; custom, ritual, tradition and taboo beset them thickly. Nothing is improvised or haphazard. No trace of the slovenliness which makes gypsy life, after unknown ages, seem half-learnt. Each detail in choice of ground and orientation and hut-building and hearth-laying, almost every sentence uttered and every gesture made, is hallowed by usage; it is the accumulation of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years; hereditary, patriarchal, established, immutable, conservative, and self-sufficient, everything emerges from a vast expanse of time as smooth with long handling as the shuttle of a loom, the blurred carving on a distaff or the patina on the shaft of a crook.
Ancient literature ignores them and there is not much in modern times. Linguistic evidence proves a wandering life since the fourteenth or fifteenth century; the probabilities point to a much earlier period. All are agreed on the north and north-western tincture of their speech. No surprise here: these are the regions where they are most plentiful. But it is surprising that the Sarakatsáns who, save for the southern Peloponnese and, with three exceptions,[11] the archipelago, are scattered all over mainland Greece, should all speak identically. Similarly, centuries of winter migration deep into Slav and Albanian and Turkish lands have left no trace on the hoary Greekness of their idiom. Costumes in Greece, especially those of the women (and, most notably those of the Vlach women), change, even more frequently than accents, from village to village; yet the garb of the Sarakatsánissas, with the barest minimum of variation, is the same all over Greece. So are their customs, down to the last detail. Everything, especially their feeling of solidarity and of aloofness from everyone else, underlines their common origin. It is very noticeable in their attitude to the Vlachs: “If you hear a shepherd use the word lapte”—the Vlach and Rumanian word for “milk”[12]—“hit him over the head.”
Ordinary Greek villagers approve of their Greekness, envy their freedom, admire the primeval sternness of their regimen, and despise their primitive ways—“they never wash,” they say “from the day they are born till the day of their death.” Their aloofness promotes distrust. Plainsmen speculate about their buried and suppositious wealth. They regard them as sly opponents and the two are often at loggerheads when nomad flocks encroach on their grazing grounds. They were always looked on with suspicion by the authorities. Wild habitat, mobility and evanescence placed them beyond the range of the Ottoman tax-collector and sheltered the boys from the press-gangs and the girls from the harems. Their eyries were a sanctuary for robbers and guerrillas and they engaged in both pursuits. Two of the greatest Klephts were almost certainly Sarakatsáns from the Agrapha mountains: Katsandónis and Karaïskakis. When the nomads came under the Greek law, their reputation for poaching pastures and for acts of banditry and ambushes for ransom, stuck. (For long decades, as in the old days, they were out of the range of taxation and military service.) Watchful and independent—unlike the Albanovlachs, who would flatter the pashas and graze their flocks—they had a fierce feeling for freedom. “We and the monasteries were the backbone of all the revolutions against the Turks,” they say, perhaps a shade boastfully; there were others. Shepherds and monks were vital to resistance in Crete and elsewhere during the German occupation. They alone knew all the passes, springs, woods, caves, short-cuts and look-out points. Klephtouriá was theirs.
They, in their turn, thought the plainspeople tame and slavish hinds, but hinds with an unfair advantage; they know how to read and write.[13] The villages and plains are a threat to freedom: if nomads pass through a village, they do it at dead of night, and pitch camp far away. Boojums to a man, they have perfected the art of snark-like vanishing at the approach of trouble. Adespotoi, “masterless,” is their key epithet.
There were many more than eighty thousand of them twenty-five years ago, and, two hundred years ago, many, many more. So vast a population could not all come from one village; let alone (though his campaigns did promote shifts of populations among the regions under him, and, no doubt, among some of the Sarakatsáns as well) as recently as Ali Pasha’s day, a century and a half ago. Apart from the contrary evidence, we would have known. The invariable tendency for nomads is to slow down and settle, not the opposite. When war or trouble drives villagers away they settle elsewhere. The nomad Sarakatsán life is a tissue of customs and usage from origins unreckonably remote.
How remote? The reader will have guessed how the wind is blowing...let us pause for a moment. There are few facts to build on but possibilities begin to assemble on which an edifice of further surmise may provisionally and diffidently be raised, and here it is: no one challenges the Greekness of the Sarakatsáns; all of them share common origins, customs, language and way of life; they have been total nomads for several centuries, probably much longer; they have always dodged official molestation and contact or marriage with strangers. They originally lived in the north-eastern mountains beyond the margin of history in regions hard of access and impervious to change; it is hard to say whether the duration of their way of life must be reckoned in hundreds of years or in thousands. Its origins are lost, as they say, in the mists of time.
But one aspect of their life may dispel these mists for a moment, and enable us, with utmost caution, to attribute a possible origin to these strange people: the identity of their textiles with the earliest Greek ceramics. Could those black and white rectangles, those woven dog-tooth staircases and saw-edges and triangles, that primitive interplay of angles and figures, spring from the same source as the geometrical designs on early Greek pottery? Are these the missing clue to the beginnings of the Sarakatsáns? Were it so, the fragments cohere in a will o’ the wisp hypothesis. No less than this: when the earliest Greeks wandered through the northern passes into the peninsula, some may have turned longing eyes on the pastures of the Pindus which lay all about them; on the Acarnanian mountains further south and the green winter grazing-grounds at their feet. They may have detached themselves and their flocks from the shining destinies of their ambitious brethren; while these expanded to the south over the Thessalian plain, founding villages and towns, and later, city states, perhaps the slow-moving drovers lagged behind in a pastoral splinter-group. Living primordially, grazing their beasts from their winter to their summer pastures, they may have remained in those regions until, at some intermediate date, they put forth shoots into the Macedonian and Thracian mountains, which in turn penetrated the more northern Balkans and Asia Minor in their seasonal search for fresh pastures. Given the mutual distrust which severed them from the plains, their horror of marriage with strangers and their skill at the vanishing trick, they would have escaped all contact with the Slavs and the other invaders in Byzantine times. Their aloofness would have exempted them from the foreign deposits which later comers left; leaving them, for better or for worse, the most Greek of all the Greeks. Far from commerce and the routes of civilization and the greed of the city states, their haunts made a late entry into recorded history. No wonder, then, that they went unchronicled.
Were all this true, they must have grazed their flocks in mid-air for aeons, vaguely aware, perhaps, of the War of Troy, the clash of the Greek cities, the elephants of Pyrrhus assembling in the valleys and Alexander’s departure to conquer the world. News of the Roman onslaught, the landin
g of St. Paul on the Macedonian coast and the fall of the West would have reached them late and garbled; the barbarian influx and the long afternoon and evening of Byzantium would have been slow to impinge. How soon would they have grasped the import of the passage of the Fourth Crusade just below them, and of the drums and tramplings of Amurath and of Bajazet the Thunderbolt and of the entry of Mohammed II into Constantinople? Perhaps they participated, in some peripheral way, in all these events. They are more likely to have remained aloof until the waterline of events, in the shape of guerrilla warriors in search of sanctuary, rose to their wigmans and sucked the nomads into history for a century or two. Now it has sunk, leaving them high and dry once more, their reclusion only broken by a change of pastures now and then, or a frontier closing, by grazing-disputes with the villagers, outbreaks of disease among their flocks and the shadowy siege of demons and ghosts and by the recurrence of red-letter-days and feasts and weddings.
Lone scholars sniping from the walls
Of learned periodicals
Our fact defend;
Our intellectual marines
Landing in little magazines
Capture a trend.[14]
Axel Hoeg, a Danish scholar flourishing earlier this century, was the original trail-blazer. I already knew his books, articles and pamphlets on the Sarakatsáns and their dialect, and his collection of their songs. I had an inkling, too, of his ideas about their origins. But what I had not read, for they only appeared recently, were Angelika Hadjimichalis’ two quarto volumes, I Sarakatsáni: wonderful books, based on a great knowledge of Greek art-history, ethnology, folklore and craftsmanship and many decades of research and fieldwork among the Sarakatsáns themselves. This lone scholar captured my trend at once. A third volume is in preparation—the great task, alas, has been delayed by ill-health—which promises to be the most interesting of the three. A lifetime of devotion and study has been lavished on these labours. It is impossible to speak of a definitive work; all here is surmise and the verdict must remain open: but I Sarakatsáni is the nearest thing to it; a rare and distinguished achievement in its incomplete state, the finished work will remain as a monument.[15]
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