Roumeli

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The only drawback to these volumes, is, for my purposes, an advantage: the author is advanced in years and the bulk of her exploration, perforce, was undertaken some time ago, and many of the nomads among whom her researches began, were chosen for their age and their long memories. The agents of detribalization, of which the author herself writes so sadly, have been hard at work. The tendency to settle has been accelerated by the closure of frontiers, the limitation of wandering, compulsory military service, and the denial of old grazing by civil authority and the settlement of two million refugees in old and undisputed pastures; and friction with villagers has helped to change the way of life of many of them. Some, though they still live in huts, became static a few generations back. Numbers of these live not far from Athens. “Yes, we’re Sarakatsáns,” they ruefully say, “we think we come from Roumeli. Our grandfathers or our great-grandfathers settled here....Allá eimaste bastardeméni: we’re bastardized....” The last quarter of a century has probably done more than the last three thousand years to change the traditional life; it is amazing that so many have remained intact. Yet even among these, who are fortunately still the majority by far, the last few decades have taken toll of many ancient ways. The life described, then, in I Sarakatsáni belongs less to today than to forty years ago. It presents a fascinating and curious picture.[16]

  The pre-Christian legacy is never far from the surface in Greece.[17] In a society like the Sarakatsáns, pagan magic survives in a yet more pronounced shape and the superstructure of Christian form is correspondingly more shaky. Traditionally, there is no awareness of the existence of the Trinity. God the Father and Jesus are the same Person and He (or They) is known as Aï, a dialect abbreviation of ayios (hagios)—“saint” or “holy one.” Sometimes He is known as Proto Aï, or the First among the Saints, sometimes as Aphenti, the Lord, from the ancient Greek word authentes (from which the Turkish title, “effendi,” also derives). All over Greece, the army of saints has taken the place of the ancient pantheon. This is especially true among the nomads; Aï is little more than the first among His peers. As one would expect in a masculine and patriarchal society, male saints have cornered the high places in this celestial company. Numbers have been drastically reduced. Only a handful, from the thousands which overlap and crowd each other in the villagers’ calendars and the Synaxary, have found their way into the huts. The greatest, as horseman, protector of flocks and folds and slayer of dragons and other predators, is St. George; his feast day, on April 23rd in the Gregorian calendar, corresponds perhaps to the great Roman shepherd festival of the Parilia on the 27th. The prominence of horses in the life of the nomads also hoists St. Demetrius and St. Theodore, equestrians both, to a height which only St. George overtops. St. George’s day is more important even than Easter, the crux of the Orthodox year. Red eggs similar to the Easter-symbols are distributed and the finest black lamb of the flock—black animals are more highly prized than white—is ritually sacrificed. (Easter is only marked by a white.) Oaths taken in the name of St. George are the most binding. St. George and St. Demetrius have another claim to fame: their feasts—May 6th and November 9th in the New Calendar—mark the start of the pastoral summer and winter when the leases for grazing begin and end and the tsellingas makes a new pact with his clan. They are days of decision. His mountain-top shrines make the prophet Elijah especially revered. (Elias in Greek; the nomads call him “St. Lios.” When the Greek world went Christian he took over the hilltop fanes to Helios-Apollo, on the strength of his name and partly because both their careers ended in the sky in fiery chariots.)[18] “He’s a mountain man like us,” they say, “he lives in the wilderness and wanders from peak to peak. He helps us and we hallow him.” The Blessed Virgin is addressed under one of her many epithets; they call her Parigorítissa, the Consolatrix; as an alien and a woman who has somehow insinuated herself into their midst, her honours are fairly cursory. St. Paraskeví is another female saint with some status. Each stani—each “fold,” clan or gathering of families and huts—has its own feast day, fortuitously depending on chapels that lie in their favourite pastures. Some have won general acceptance: the Assumption—like Elijah’s, the eponymous churches often perch on mountains; St. Constantine, the champion of Hellenism; the Deposition and the Purification; and in the Agrapha mountains, the Nativity of the Virgin, thanks to her great monastery there, hard of access in the Proussos gorge. Our Lady of Vella, between Yanina and Konitza, is honoured for a like reason. St. Athanasios is not cultivated as a Doctor of the Church, but, unexpectedly, as a warden of flocks. They neglect his January name-day because it falls in lambing-time and celebrate it later in the year. The fondness of Macedonian Sarakatsáns for St. John the Baptist is probably due to his shaggy iconographic outfit: it looks far more like their own goat-skin homespun than camel-hair; he lived in the wilderness too. They boil beans on his feast day and distribute and eat them in church. The bean-feast is linked with pagan magic ceremonial at harvest time and commemorates, almost certainly, the Pyanepsia when the ancients boiled and ate broad beans to bring fertility and a year of plenty.

  The usual pan-hellenic spirits—Pagans, Airy or Shadowy Ones, Exotics, vampires, werewolves, dragons, ghosts and Kallikantzaro-centaurs—people their cosmogony and infest the folds. They can be exorcized by counter-spells and baffled by phylacteries of dog’s droppings; a dried snake’s head, hidden in a church for forty days and then retrieved, is sovereign against many baleful manifestations. To the Nereids, a danger for all lonely shepherds near pools and streams, young Sarakatsáns are particularly exposed. They are struck dumb and robbed of their wits by blundering on their revels by mistake, as mortals were sometimes turned into trees if they had the bad luck to interrupt the dances of the nymphs. There are mixed nomad-Nereid marriages and these water-girls steal healthy Sarakatsán babies from their hanging cradles, leaving sickly changelings in their stead. Demons of every kind and gender dog shepherds’ footsteps uphill and down dale and “chase them into woods,” as the saying goes. The nomads are a special target for female supernaturals called the Kalotyches—(“the good fortunes”: like the name Eumenides (“the kindly ones”) for the Furies, this is a wry placating misnomer)—who are half women, half she-asses and snake-locked like Medusa. They plague the flocks and bring bad luck at lambing time and childbed and they are especially dangerous during the forty days following a birth. Other Shadowy Ones lurk round the pallets of the ailing and the dying. But the darkest villain in Sarakatsán demonology is a male spirit known as the Daouti. Daoutis, sometimes called Pans, are the wildest, strongest and wickedest of them all. Shaped like satyrs, with a body half-goat, half-human and long legs with cleft hoofs, they have the heads of rams and long twirling horns. Like other demons—the Shadowy Ones and the Kalotyches, in particular—Daoutis are doubly threatening to flocks at three seasons: in Advent (just before lambing, that is); in late April or early May, as the shepherds prepare to leave their winter quarters for the mountains; and from the feast of the Transfiguration until the end of August. They swoop shrieking like birds of prey and the flocks cower in caves and sheepfolds. After two or three of these onslaughts, the beasts begin to perish by the dozen. They swell up and die. Sliced tortoise meat is brought into play as a counter-spell and the shepherds shift camp at once. If a priest can be found, he sprinkles the new site with holy water and the bells are removed and blessed. Unlike most wicked spirits, these Daoutis attack without shame in broad daylight, and, having the knack of making friends with the dogs, they pad along after the flocks unmolested; so, when an emergency fold is built, the shepherds leave their dogs behind and kindle fires to form a magic circle of smoke. Daoutis learn the Christian names of mortals, so if they hear strangers calling the shepherds hold their tongues: answering might strike them dumb for ever. These terrible spirits spread sudden panics and when they are not busy doing evil they settle out of sight but within earshot and play their flutes.

  Trees are the dwelling-places of spirits. They are the haunt of the
Kalotyches and unless countercharms are murmured while felling and lopping, these wretches are loosed on the woods. Many bushes, all thorn trees and especially the wild pear, have powerful spirit-repelling properties. Box is a powerful apotropaic; the osier which is woven into all their huts is the strongest and most hallowed of all. Flowers are plaited into phylacteries; their sweet smell, and even the memory of it when the flowers have faded, drives evil away. They have odd and hazy notions about the past: they believe that the Hellenes, the ancient Greeks, were taller than oaks and as strong: they spanned wide rivers at a single pace and strode from peak to peak. They never fell ill; they died suddenly and often broke their necks by falling down cliffs in their bold mountain pacings, turning at once into benevolent ghosts. The nomads speak of a heroic and mythical Macedonian character called Roublouki, whose attributes sound rather like those of Alexander the Great, the hero and darling of Greek folk tales and the only one of the ancients to gatecrash the Karayiozi shadow-play.

  Running, wrestling and racing each other on horseback are favourite pastimes and they vie with each other in tossing heavy stones, sometimes weighing as much as five okas. They also compete in stealing-matches; jokes and tales about theft abound. When a gypsy smith forged the nails for Aï’s crucifixion, one of them is said to have been stolen by a Sarakatsán—perhaps he meant to save Aï’s life by stealing all three. It was rammed up his behind “by the wicked Jews” in retaliation. (A good deed seldom goes unpunished.)

  As of old, good and evil omens are discerned in the flight of birds. They abhor eagles and vultures and all birds of prey that hover on high: they are minions of the Devil in league with all evil spirits; when these harbingers of peril hover above a caravan they are spying out the destination. Abomination for these birds also springs from occasional raids when new-born kids are carried piteously bleating into the sky. The nomads haruspicate from entrails; like most ancient and modern Greeks, they read the future in the markings on sheep’s shoulder blades. Their sacrifices—kourbania[19] as they are called—are frequent. A pitta—a kind of cake which is baked in a wide metal pan—is the rather gloomy fare at most of their feasts; they consider it wrong to kill and eat an animal without some ritual pretext. They only get meat when a beast is slaughtered for a sacrificial occasion, so they pine for these pretexts, even when the cause is a distressing one: their eyes kindle as the great festivals draw near. A wedding or the christening of a tzellingas’s son, the illness of one of their community, an epidemic among the flocks, the birth of a seven-month child, the arrival of an honoured guest, or the end of shearing—all these are an excuse for meat. They lay the sacrificial beast on a flattened branch with its eyes looking into the sun, then cut its throat and roast it whole on a spit. The act is surrounded by much mystery and they peer at the insides for mantic significance; at Easter, a bloody cross from the Paschal lamb is dabbed on the shoulders of children.[20]

  Fire is sacred and the hearth especially so: “Aï was born close to a fire.” Extinction is a particularly bad omen if it happens in the winter sojourn or in a wayside camp. They keep up a blaze during the twelve days of Christmas to fend off the Pagan Ones; a troublesome breed of the Kallikantzaros is abroad then; it is known as the lykokantzaros, the “wolf-centaur,” or, rather oddly, the astróvoli, “starstroke.” A vast log burns slowly all through Advent to proof the settlement against the supernatural pests of the season; buried at the door of the fold on Christmas day, it keeps illness, Shadows and the Eye at bay. Women always give birth next to the hearth for the same defensive reason and the powers of darkness are driven off with foul-smelling smoke for the following twelve days. Miscarried babies, also the caul when a live baby is born, are buried under a flat stone beside the hearth; not in the middle, as people entering the hut must tread across a burning log, which, were this precaution not observed, would breed vampirism in the mother’s blood.[21] Burial by the hearth “charms the child back to life”; that is, it reincarnates it quickly in its mother’s womb. They used to stow stillborn babies in a goat-skin full of salt and hang it on a branch by the hut for forty days, then burn it lest it should take its mother with it. A cross is inscribed on a new-born child with burning wood, then quenched in water. The Fates visit the suckling’s cradle three nights running; the usual offerings are left for them, and people with good souls can eavesdrop and expound their prophecies.

  Sarakatsáns think Christmas is a private feast of their own, a reminder that Aï was born in a fold, laid in a manger and watched over by shepherds and their flocks. A host of pagan customs surrounds the Christmas octave. Some of them are very ancient observances connected with the winter solstice; others, more recent, derive from Mithras and the Unconquered Sun. (Mithraism in the Levant was only stamped out by St. Basil in the fourth century.) A twig of mock-privet and another of ilex, heavy with acorns, are thrown into the fire on Christmas Eve to induce fertility among the flocks; the way they burn indicates how the lambing will go. A ewe is then sacrificed to Aï and the shepherds gather to eat and drink and carouse from hut to hut: rejoicings that put the swarming fairies, demons, infidels and monsters to flight and Antichrist himself. At dawn they cut and spread new grass for the new-born kids and lambs “to sleep on fresh beds for the first three days of Aï,” and the children all go down to the springs and drink in dead silence. They throw butter and cheese into the water and return with twigs of ilex, mock-privet and terebinth, which they cast into the flames. The sizzling of the green wood is called “talking” and “singing,” and “many kids, happy lambing!” is its burden.

  At New Year, the tsellingas gives every shepherd a pomegranate which he breaks and scatters about the fold. Dried maize is ritually devoured on the vigil of Epiphany and the old women sprinkle the animals from oak and olive branches dipped in holy water. At this feast, too, the girls wash the year’s smoke and rust off the ikons beside a spring with hanks of red wool and then hang them on branches.

  The approach to Lent is the signal for further doings, especially the Saturday night and the early hours of Cheese Sunday which immediately precede it. The season gives rise to singular conduct not found elsewhere, and now, alas, largely extinct: transvestitism, the wearing of masks, the painting of faces, the donning of whiskers and beards of goats’ hair—all this, with copious drinking and horseplay and cheerful frisking about among the wigwams, is still pretty current practice, a token of rustic carnival zest; but it can take a more stylized form. A heavily painted young man in a scarlet dress and long goat-skin locks is chosen as a bride and a whiskered and skin-clad comrade as the groom; others are rigged out as the priest, the koumbaros and the wedding guests. Then a cod Christian marriage is irreverently solemnized, followed by dances far less inhibited than are those at a real marriage. The bridal pair retire to a hut and, to the hilarity of all, comic simulacra of considerable indecency are enacted within. The groom is found wanting and thrown out; candidate after candidate enters with visible promise and each one is ejected in disgrace. At last a fitting champion is elected and, during a final mime of triumphant bawdiness, the entire company dance round the hut singing “the Pepper Song,” the dancers alternately banging their noses and their rumps on the ground with a see-saw motion I would give much to see.[22] Mock baptism follows a mock birth and mummers dressed as gypsies bang each other about with sacks full of ashes. Then a grave is dug and a shrouded nomad is buried with pseudo-pomp and covered with pebbles and twigs; candles are lit and dirges sung. But, with the approach of dawn and the first cawing of the crows, the dirges, the wails, the gnashing of teeth and the rending of garments take a more lifelike turn until at last the company seizes the corpse by the feet and, amidst general clamour, he bounds from the grave; and then, as day breaks at last, the whole clan dances a universal syrtos round the fire. These goings on are said to drive away drought and guarantee an abundance of leaves and grass for the flocks. Another resurrection play commemorates the feast of St. Lazarus. A boy dressed as the corpse of the Saint lies in each hut in s
ilence for half an hour. Next day, on Palm Sunday, a huge Lazarus-doll made of anemones and the other flowers, which at this season cover the mountains and the plains, is borne processionally by boys, who also carry huge baskets of flowers, to the tune of special songs and the clanging of goat bells. (These resurrection pageants might be the cue for specialists to seek analogies with the feasts of Adonis; they might be on the right track.)

  The Lenten fast is observed with rigorous ferocity. In some folds, on Good Friday, the old women used to tie two sticks together to form a primitive doll with a ball of cloth for a head, on which eyes, a nose and a mouth were drawn in charcoal. Wrapping it in a shroud of rag and laying it on a table or a heap of stones, the women would sing, all day long and over and over again, the seventy couplets of the Song of the Consoler. This was to help the Blessed Virgin to forget the death of her Son, and, in so doing, bring consolation to everyone else for any bereavement they may have suffered. As night fell, they smashed the doll and threw the bits into a wood or a gully. We have seen that Easter, the crown of the Orthodox year, is a lesser feast among these shepherds; but they light a large fire to burn a stuffed effigy of Judas.[23] They arm their animals with their heavy bronze bells on the feast of the Annunciation—the 25th of March—“about the time when the first cuckoo sings.” They drive the flocks along to try out the harmony of their chime, and disarm them again in the evening; then children make the round of the huts ringing the bells and singing an Annunciation song in their honour; they carry a basket of flowers which their elders fill with money and eggs. Transient as mushrooms, each little gathering of huts has a calendar as strictly appointed and as scrupulously observed as the cycle of an ancient metropolis.