What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?
[1] Decades or centuries ago the only notable thing here was a hermit living under a tree. Both have vanished but the old Turkish name, Dedeagatch, which commemorates the hermit-tree, is still sometimes heard. Its new name celebrates Tsar Alexander II, the victor over the Turks in the Balkans, not King Philip’s great son.
[2] This addition is frequent, especially in monasteries. I have never succeeded in discovering why.
[3] I write with feeling of the complications involved in the office of koumbaros, for I performed it a short time ago at the marriage of Antony, the son of an old Cretan brother-in-arms, Grigori Chnarakis of Thrapsano. This bond, both a compliment and a responsibility, is held more binding than kinship.
[4] It is, in fact, the birthplace of Kolettis, the War of Independence hero, one of the early Prime Ministers of Greece, and at one time the Greek Minister in Paris, mentioned in the Goncourt diaries; also of the poets Krystallis and Zalacosta. It is a large Vlach village on the Acheloös—Aspropótamo, or “white river” in demotic. The inhabitants are known as tzintzari, which resembles the Rumanian word for mosquitoes. In winter their huts are scattered inland from Preveza by the hundred.
[5] Both these derivations of the word Sarakatsán are wrong. More of this later, and also, later still, about the Koutzovlachs.
[6] To embroil matters further, the word “Karagouni” is also used for the inhabitants of several Greek villages near Karditza on the Thessalian plain, and, loosely and chaffingly, as a derogatory nickname for any Thessalian.
[7] Another ritual conjuration that is often inserted at a break in the line is Amán!, the Turkish for “mercy!” Though its role is often that of a stopgap, I think it is basically a railing at fate, an unspecific act of compassion, as it were, for intolerable sorrows and disasters in the past; half “willow willow waly,” half “aï de mi.” At the end of each fifteen-syllable line of the rhyming couplets which are the most common metre for these mountain epics—spun out and embroidered, however, into many more than fifteen when they are being sung—several amáns, strung together as a single word, boom in a deep bass from the whole company: amánamánamánamááán! There was no dearth of this today.
[8] I must apologize here for a bad mistake in Mani. I stated there that sixteen-syllable verses (as opposed to the almost universal fifteen) only exist in Maniot dirges. It is not true: there are several other very small pockets of this verse form dotted about and this very song, I see from my notes, is one of them. I wish I knew where it came from.
[9] The rich conflict of derivations for the word Sarakatsán is developed in Appendix I.
[10] All Greek nomads wear hooded goats’ hair capes in winter.
[11] Aegina, Poros and Euboea.
[12] Deriving from the Latin lac, lactis, as opposed to the ancient and modern Greek word gala, galaktos.
[13] Not all, by any means.
[14] W.H. Auden: Nones.
[15] Unfortunately they are only in Greek. Infinitely worse, just as these pages go to press, death has halted these labours.
[16] I have visited a number of nomad camps in the last month or two in the Epirus area, and many of the customs described in I Sarakatsáni are still in full force; some have recently died out, some are only recalled by old men and toothless crones; a few have vanished from living memory. As this is not a scientific work, I will not elaborate these distinctions. To avoid a barnacle growth of caveats and provisos, I will put all in the present tense. But much of it, especially the religious part, should be dated half a century ago.
[17] See Chap. 10, Mani, by Patrick Leigh Fermor.
[18] See Chap. 13, Mani.
[19] I have just read, in a Hakluyt Society account of a sixteenth-century Portuguese embassy to the Prester John, that Qerbān is the Ethiopian or Amharic word for the Host in the Monophysite Mass. Both must have been stolen from the Turkish word for the Moslem sacrifice of a lamb at the kourbān-Bairam, commemorating the sacrifice of Abraham and the ransom of Ishmael by the slaughter of a lamb.
[20] Badly wounded nomads are wrapped in the skins of newly killed rams. This suggests an analogy with the Aesculapian formula at the Amphiareion in Attica, and at Epidaurus, of making invalids incubate in ram-skins as a preliminary to their cure.
[21] Children are often born in the autumn and spring migrations. Alerted by the start of travail, the mother drops behind the caravan with a companion and the baby is born. Then they hurry to catch up.
[22] I tried to do so this year, in a stani near Nea Philippiada, not far from Preveza. There was lots of merrymaking and some mild transvestitism, but no more.
[23] In Crete he is hanged and burned. In Hydra he used to be stood up before a firing squad and shot down amid execration.
[24] It is all the more remarkable, then, that Karaïskakis should have been such a one. Not only did he grow up and prosper, but he became protopallíkaro—a second in command of guerrillas—to the great Sarakatsán hero Katsandóni, and, when he died, inherited his band in the Agrapha. In the War of Independence, he was one of the great glories of Greece. This example might have softened their harsh prejudices.
[25] The spirit of death.
[26] Borrowed, indeed, from my kind host at Modi, in the Chalkidike peninsula, Mr. Peter Stathatos. It carried me over half Macedonia and much of Thrace, covering more than five hundred miles by the time we got back to his stable a month later.
[27] Alternatively Strymon.
[28] Author of Honour, Family and Patronage (O.U.P., 1964). A study of institutions and moral values in the Sarakatsán community.
[29] It took some time to get the meaning of the word he used for “woman.” It is gynaika in ordinary demotic; Andoni pronounced it y’niák.
2. THE MONASTERIES OF THE AIR
THE GREEK summer dies slowly. October was melting into November, but only the earlier dusk, the sudden mists, the chill mountain air and the conflagration of the beech trees had hinted, as we advanced from Macedonia down the eastern flank of the Pindus, that autumn and winter were on their way. Here, where the Peneios falls into the Thessalian plain and saunters off down its broad and pebbly bed, not a leaf had fallen from the plane trees. Behind us climbed the Pindus, the road branching steeply westwards over the Metsovo pass to Yanina and Epirus. But to the east the Thessalian champaign expanded from the mountain’s foot as smoothly as an inland sea, its distant shores of Olympus and Ossa and Pelion invisible in the early autumn haze.
In the flurry of impending arrival in Kalabaka and the screeches in Vlach as the truckload of migrants assembled their babies and poultry and their bundles, the Meteora went almost unnoticed. Only when we were nearly in the streets of Kalabaka did we gaze up at the tremendous spikes and cylinders of rock that soared for perpendicular hundreds of feet into the sky. There was nothing to halt the upward path of the eye, except, here and there, an irrelevant tuft of vegetation curling from the rock-face on a single stalk; or the straight damp smear of some spring’s overflow, shining like a snail’s track from the eagle-haunted regions to the outskirts of the grovelling village. One immense drum of stone ascended immediately overhead. Behind, separated by leaf-filled valleys, the pillars and stalagmites retreated in demented confusion, rising, curling and leaning, tapering to precarious isolated pedestals (on the summit of one of which the wall and the belfry of a monastery, minute and foreshortened, could just be discerned) or swelling and gathering like silent troops of mammoth halted in meditation on the tundra’s edge.
We gazed upwards in silence for a long time. Even the Koutzovlachs, blunted to this phenomenon by their migrations to and from their summer villages in the Pindus and their Thessalian winter-pastures, seemed lost in wonder. They only sank their glance at the cry of some fellow-villager making the month-long journey by road with the village flocks. For the streets were a moving tide of sheep, and the air was full of golden dust and baas and shouted greetings in the strange Latin dialect of these black-clad she
pherds. Through the assembly of homespun cloaks and whiskers and crooks and the fleecy turmoil, a tall monk advanced. He was a head and shoulders taller than anyone else, and his high cylindrical hat increased his height to the stature of a giant. “There you are,” the driver said. “There’s Father Christopher, the Abbot of St. Barlaam.”
Could we stay at his monastery for the night? Of course we could, or two or three. His assent was underlined by a friendly blow on the shoulder and smile on that long saturnine face that radiated the wiry strands of his beard in a bristling fan. Half an hour later we were advancing westwards on either side of his mare. A satchel of provisions hung from one side of the saddle bow, a wicker-caged demijohn of wine from the other. In the middle, loose and easy in the saddle, puffing at his short pipe, talking, or quietly humming to himself, rode the hospitable abbot. The greetings of passing peasants, as we ambled westwards, prompted a response of humorous and squire-ish banter or an occasional mock-threatening flourish or a jovial prod with his great stick. The shadows in the astonishing rocks were broadening, and all, in the second village of Kastraki, was mellow and golden. Then the last houses fell behind, and as we rounded the vast central tympanum of conglomerate, a deep gorge opened before us, that dwindled and climbed along a chasm between the mountains. The white walls of the monastery of the Transfiguration appeared on a ledge far overhead and soon, the outline of St. Barlaam. My heart sank at the height and the distance. It seemed impossible that we should ever reach that eagle’s nest....At that moment, the sun dipped below the serrated edge of the Pindus. The mountains ahead turned grey-blue and cold and threatening and sad, and every trace of cheer seemed to die from the world. Those Greco- and Mantegna-like rocks might have been the background for the desert macerations of St. Jerome, the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, or the Wilderness of the Temptation.
As night fell, the road insensibly climbed. At the foot of the rock of St. Barlaam, a great square chasm, choked with undergrowth and rock, disappeared into the mountainside. “The cave of the dragon,” the abbot said, pointing through the dusk, with a quiet and slightly grating laugh, “safely stowed away under the monastery.” The road turned into a narrow flagged ascent between overpowering volumes of rock, winding among boulders and twisted plane trees and opening at last into a slanting world from which all glimpse of the plain was locked out. We were deeply engaged in this improbable geology. But a turn of the path led from our labyrinth into the most brilliant moonlight, and the mountains were suddenly robbed of their menace and their weight. All was silver and light and magical and miraculously silent. The plane trees were as still as the gleaming precipices themselves, as though each leaf had been rolled out of precious metal and beaten thin and then wired to the silver branches. Fathoms above, the reception platform of St. Barlaam and the jutting tiles of its eaved penthouse projected into the moonlight in a galleon’s poop, from which, like an anchor at the end of its cable, the great hook hung. The smooth sides of the cliff were not only perpendicular, but at many points they curved outwards and overhung their base, as naked of projection or foothold as the glass mountain in a fairy tale. High in the void, the fabric of the monastery overflowed its monolithic pedestal in a circle of jutting walls and eaves and storeys.
The abbot drew rein and let out a roar. The echoing syllables of the name “Bessarion!” dwindled and died down the valley. High above, on the ledge of the monastery, a pale spectacled face peered over the bar of the penthouse and a faint greeting came sailing down. “Let down the rope and come and look after the mare,” the abbot’s voice boomed up. The hook, taking two minutes on the way, revolved down to us as the thick steel cable was payed out. This, until the steps were cut in 1932, was the only way into the monastery. In those days, the traveller squatted in a net whose topmost meshes were hitched over the hook, which then floated gently into the air and, revolving and unwinding on itself, was slowly hauled up to the platform on a winch. The net, on its arrival, was fished in with a hooked pole and lowered to the boards. The traveller was then released. In the past century a rope as thick as a man’s wrist was used. Answering the query how often it was changed, a former abbot is reported to have said: “Only when it breaks...”
The Deacon Bessarion, breathless from his run down the steps, helped the abbot secure the luggage and supplies to the hook, unsaddled the mare, and led her off to the stable on the flank of the opposing rock, joining us then in the long climb. The staircase twisted back on itself again and again under the overshadowing rock from which it had been hollowed and brought us at last, panting and tired, to a heavy iron doorway. This opened, through a hole, into a dark stepped grotto through the heart of the rock. We rose at last into a courtyard of the monastery that was only divided from the gulf by a low stone wall. A spacious loggia, paved with square black and white slabs, lay at the top of another short ascent, built out at a recent date from the Byzantine brickwork of the monastery. A cypress tree, stooping in the wind, miraculously flourished there. The tiles and the cupolas of the church in the light of the moon, the patina and disorder of the monastic buildings looked domestic and human after the chaos of rock through which we had come up. Turning round, the abbot—a portentous figure on the top step, with his beard and his robes blown sideways in the sudden tramontana—opened his hands in an ample gesture of welcome. Then, leaning over the rail of a penthouse which shook with every gust of wind while Father Bessarion toiled at the windlass, we watched the burdened hook ascending. The luggage, the saddle and the demijohn were safely unloaded on the planks. Leading us into the chapel, the abbot lit a taper at the sanctuary lamp and the gold and silver of the iconostasis and the innumerable haloes of frescoed saints twinkled among the shadows. Making the sign of the cross and kissing the main ikons, the abbot and Father Bessarion retired. We followed them out into the moonlit yard. There was nobody about and no lights in the windows. The buildings appeared aloof and spellbound.
I half remembered the details of the guest-room, as Father Christopher turned up the wick of an oil-lamp, from the few days I had spent there four years before the war—the table with a glass bowl full of the cards of visiting ministers and prelates and Byzantologists, the sofa under the window, the faded Russian print of a panorama of Jerusalem. It seemed curious that anything as human and welcoming as this golden lamplit chamber could exist on so windy and austere a height. But soon Father Bessarion was cutting up apples and goat’s cheese for a mézé to accompany the ouzo with which the abbot replenished the little glasses the moment they were emptied; and when we sat down together to a frugal supper of beans, the great demijohn was uncorked. By the time the two monks were lighting their pipes, we were thick in conversation about the war and the problems of Greece and the decay of Orthodox Monasticism. They made an interesting contrast—the shy, diminutive Bessarion with his ragged cassock and soft skull-cap, the eager benignity of his eyes behind thick lenses, and the abbot’s great stature, his shrewd and humorous glance, the lean sardonic features repeated on the wall in a gigantic shadow embowered in clouds of smoke. A thread of raciness and worldly-wisdom ran through his discourse. His family had been priests in Kalabaka for centuries. Quitting this traditional sequence of the secular clergy, he had become a monk of St. Barlaam at the age of thirty-two, and then, which sounded unusually swift, he had been ordained deacon and priest and appointed archimandrite and abbot three months later. He was now seventy-six, and had never suffered more than a few days’ illness in his life. His remedy for an occasional cold or a touch of fever was, he maintained, infallible—five days up in the mountains with the flocks belonging to the monastery, innumerable okas of wine, sleep every night in the shepherds’ brushwood huts, and then—he extended his vast hands in the gesture of Samson embracing the columns of Gaza—he felt as strong as a giant once more. Father Bessarion, he hoped, would succeed him in his abbacy. Stroking the great tortoiseshell tom cat in his lap—there were two in the monastery, Makry, now sleepily purring, and a little black female with a white face and
a red ribbon round her neck, called Marigoula—he described the monastery in winter, when the mountains were deep in snow and the jutting timbers stalactitic with icicles. “Some of them are many yards long and more than two feet thick. When the thaw starts, they break off and tumble into the valley with a noise like cannon-fire. Sometimes the clouds are so thick that Bessarion and I bump into each other in the church while singing the office....” How strange and lonely this bachelor life sounded! Other monks were mentioned, but we only saw one during the whole of our stay, a man of unbelievable age who tapped his way slowly into church one morning with a walking-stick.
After the hard planks on which I had been sleeping in the villages of the Pindus, the bed in my white-washed room was a great luxury. When the wind dropped I could hear the deep level breathing of the sleeping abbot in the room next door, and, occasionally, a sigh of contentment. Then the wind began to moan once more round our tapering mattress of rock. Outside, the moon rimmed the tiled cupolas of the church, filling the empty slanting leagues that ran southward from these columnar mountains with a pale and glimmering lustre.
At luncheon next day, the abbot’s chair was empty. He had risen in the dark and ridden off to harangue some charcoal burners working in the monastery woods on the slopes of the Khasian mountains; a journey involving six hours in the saddle each way. We were alone with Bessarion. Outside the extreme severity of Mount Athos there seems to be no distinction of sex in the hospitality offered by Orthodox monasteries, and Joan was as welcome a guest here as any of the male visitors. Bessarion’s large eyes kindled behind his glasses as he told the stories of the local saints of Thessaly—the miracles of St. Dionysius of Karditza and the death of the patron of his native place, St. Gideon of Tyrnavos, martyred just over a century ago by Veli Pasha, son to Ali, the famous tyrant of Yanina. His own life story was interesting enough. After our retreat from Greece in 1941, he had hidden two British soldiers for a number of months in the foothills of Mount Olympus, later increasing their number with a wing-commander who had baled out of his burning aircraft on to the Thessalian plain. When this became too dangerous, he escaped with them by submarine from Trikeri, south of Mount Pelion, to the Middle East, where he served with the Greek Army from El Alamein to the final Greek triumph at Rimini. But he had always longed to be a monk, and, on his release, he had spent a number of months in various Athonite cloisters and hermitages. Then he stayed for a while in the monastery of Dousko on Mount Khodziakas, but, feeling unable to settle there, removed to the Meteora.
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