Roumeli

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The island has always abounded with marvels and portents and the exaggeration of the mountains casts an overpowering spell. Insanity and genius vibrate in the air. It is no wonder that the spirit of early Greece, surfacing in the Minoan world, took so odd a twist here, or that this should be the birthplace of Zeus and the setting of the myths of Pasiphae and the Minotaur and Daedalus. Nobody who knows the lines and the mood of these mountains can be surprised that they gave birth to the most brilliant of the Greek schools of ikon painting; those crags almost turn El Greco into an explicable phenomenon.

  The islanders’ passion for their country turns the island itself into the heroine of most of their songs: “Crete, my beautiful island, crown of the Levant,” runs one of the couplets they often sing, “your earth is silver and your rocks are diamonds.” This is more than a flowery trope: the metamorphic limestone mass, especially where it soars above the tree-line in a wilderness where nothing can grow, does shine like silver and lend to the great peaks, even in August, an illusion of eternal snow; and the sharp-edged and many-faceted rocks throw back the light with a dazzling and adamantine flash. In ravines and hollows at midday, when the sun has drained every shadow, a hint of feat is present. There are no trees for the cicadas, no goat-bells to be heard across the stagnant air; the far-off ricochets of an invisible shepherd practising against a boulder, stop. Sound expires with a gasp; the only hint of life is a horned skeleton lying among the rocks, as though an ogre lived not far off. The world becomes a hushed and blinding wilderness. Colour ebbs from the sky; the hot mineral shudders; all is haggard and aghast. It is the hour of meridian fright and an invisible finger runs up the nape of the lonely traveller there and sets his hair on end. At moments like these the island stands in the sea like an anvil for the inaudible strokes of the sun.

  Then pinpoints of shade expand. There is a jangle, and a waking hoof, unloosing a small landslide and an echo, puts an end to this catalepsy. Afternoon divides the ascending gorges with diagonals of light and flutes the overhangs of rock. Shadows accumulate in corridors frilled with dittany. Narrow enough for spiders to span, they wind for miles at the bottom of precipices that almost close overhead. At last the walls begin to yawn and fall apart. The gap is full of wheeling kestrels and a causeway opens on the hollow evening universe.

  Below, in the gold and powdery radiance, village follows village down the flanks of Canaanitish valleys. Their western walls descend in tiers of light. If it is spring, a mist of green corn bright with poppies almost brushes the olive branches. Later, the lanes are pulpy with fallen mulberries; flocks trail their shadows along the slant of the light in a score of tinkling dust-clouds. But, in the years of which I have been speaking, we had to turn away from these georgic scenes and climb into a landscape as different from them as another star. In those giant apocalyptic regions the sun lingered long after the lowlands had been invaded by dusk. Lit still by the remains of the day, the rocks flared ochre and apricot and orange, with shadows of electric green and ice-and magnesium-blue. The edges of the crags and the tilted rock-blades turned saffron and mauve as the last light filled those barren glades and slid upwards out of reach. Then in the wolf-light, the colours would soften and deepen and merge and each dying stone disputed the advance of the dark with its own private glow. The world became legendary. Oracular caves gaped, chasms of delusion fell away, each canyon was the Valley of the Shadow. Sinais, and the Eternal Rocks in the background of Cretan icons, soared. Solemnity invaded everything. We were in the landscape of St. Jerome’s hermitage, of trecento Temptations and Agonies. High above, on the uttermost pinnacle, the last of the daylight would linger like a Transfiguration, then glide aloft and disperse in the fainting and darkening sky. It was night. Our red cigarette ends would brighten as we sat on the rocks before the final weary scramble and the exchange of whistles in the dark that would tell us that we were home again.

  STOP PRESS

  A last word on Romiosyne! In 1901, the writer Argyris Ephtaliotis published a book called A History of Romiosyne. The name was pounced on at once and Hellenism instantly found a brilliant champion in the academician, archaeologist and writer, George Sotiriadis.[17] Reviewing the book, he demanded that the word Romiòs should henceforth be used only in one specific and pejorative sense: “a mean, vulgar and sordid man”—Greek is understood. His fiat evoked distinguished opposition; a giant rose from the shadows: Kostis Palamas, no less. (The place of Palamas[18] among Greek poets exactly matches that of Victor Hugo and Tennyson in France and England, and homage to his supremacy is sometimes rendered with a trace of Gide’s famous reluctance about Hugo.) The poet, in seven persuasive pages, goes to the opposite extreme from Sotiriadis. Some form of the word Romiòs, he urges (quoting Krumbacher), was the ordinary word for a Greek from the reign of Justinian to the time when he, Palamas, was writing. It was the identity of the Eastern half of the Empire with Christianity which drove the word “Hellene” from everyone’s lips. Among Christian Greeks, the word now meant only a compatriot who clung to the pagan faith, an idolator, and when the gods went underground into folklore, the name of their votaries dropped into disuse too. Outside scholarship, the word only dimly survived in folk tales and fairy stories, where the word “Hellene” still carries a suggestion of supermen and giants.[19] Perhaps they are a survival from the stories about the titans still lingering on dimly in country minds, the ghosts of ghosts. The resurrection of “Hellene,” says Palamas, is dust flung in the eyes of foreigners; (surely this is too harsh?); Romiòs, reality.

  The word he urges, is anything but shameful. It may not, like “Hellene,” be garlanded with the victor’s wild olive from the Olympic games, but it is wreathed with the thorns of martyrdom and redolent of thyme and gunpowder. The name conjures up the glories of Byzantium, but also its fall and all the ensuing sorrows. And now, writes Palamas, the martyrdom of the Romiòs still continues: on his back all the new sins of the liberated and constitutional Hellenes are loaded. He is frogmarched into the alien role of the vulgar pseudo-politician bawling in the coffee houses of Athens, the paunchy gasbag and the know-all—the “average Greek” of Athenian caricatures—who is always bragging about how he would fix things in the new kingdom, if he had his way. In a passage of great skill, Palamas deftly switches the blame for the now restricted and pejorative interpretation of Romiòs to the vices and pretentions of the resuscitated Hellenes.

  It meant, he continues, something different to their ancestors. The name was worn like a mantle of glory. It was emblematic of a lonely aristocratic pride, a possession not to be exchanged for all the principalities of the Orient and the West. He cites the klephtic song of Vlachavas, the last of the great armatoles of the Khasian crags between Olympus and the Meteora: “Romiòs ego genníthika, Romiòs the na petháno” he says in the song, before he was slowly cut in small pieces, without a single groan, by the executioners of Ali Pasha: “A Romiòs I was born and a Romiòs I shall die.” Palamas then brings up a damaging battery of quotations, in each of which “Romiòs” is synonymous with honour and warlike courage. He begins with a mediaeval song in which the Greek soldiers cry “Dragons and the children of dragons are the Romaic warriors.” “Bulgars and Albanians and Serbs and Romaíoi,” wrote the poet Rigas Pheraios, urging the Balkans to unite against the Ottoman rule, “are girding on their swords.” “Behold the Romaíoi, the stout pallikars,” says a Cretan, describing some ancient siege, “little reck they for the arrows and the shot, the culverins and the lances!” Daskaloyannis, the Cretan hero, “yearns in his heart for the day when enslaved Crete shall be Romiosyne,” and urges all the Romaíoi to rise up “and devour the Turks.” In 1792 Lambros Katsonis, the great seaman who harried the Turkish fleet all over the Aegean, refers to the “renowned company of Romaic fighting men who represent the Hellenic race”—a significant juxtaposition! When the great Kolokotrones himself, in his Events of the Hellenic Race, opposes the Turks to “the Romans,” he does the same. The death of the hero of Souli, Marko Botsaris, in the
battle of Karpenisi, was lamented at once in klephtic verse:

  And when the Romaíoi learnt the news, and when

  they heard the tidings

  (curious how reminiscent of the Songs in the Old Testament, and especially of the Psalms, is this rephrasing of the same statement!)

  they dressed themselves in clothes of black,

  they clad themselves in mourning.

  This is heavy artillery. Nothing vulgar, mean or sordid here. After vindicating and setting free the word he found so bitterly wronged, he counter-attacks with vigour: What about the word “Hellene”? Is it not obsolete and artificial, and, with its lingering hints of the pagan world, inaccurate? Is there not something ceremonious and sluggish about it—pompous, in fact? Mr. Ephtaliotis was right to entitle his book as he did: “historical accuracy demanded it.” “And surely,” he argues in his peroration, “there is a purer and deeper linguistic feeling, something musical and poetical in Romiosyne, something spirited and light and winged, which, I think, is lacking in ‘Hellenism’ with all its heavy and immobile magnificence.”

  Romiosyne has lost more ground in the six decades since he wrote.[20] I can’t follow Palamas all the way in his attack on Hellenism; I am too fond of both. But the argument reflects the struggle which is this chapter’s theme. It is an overt symptom of the private wrestling match which I think is taking place in eight million arenas. No foreigner can say which side is right. The conflict involves not only reason and history but atavistic, subconscious and tribal instincts too deep for any stranger’s reach. But, as things are, the Hellenic lion beats the unicorn of Romiosyne all round the town; confusion begins to rob the strange creature of substance; oblivion looms about it like a wood, its outline blurs as the branches multiply. But even though in a few decades its beautiful name may be no longer uttered, I hope Romiosyne won’t vanish for ever. The Hellene and the Romiòs need and complete each other. Long live both of them; or perhaps it would be safer to say, since these last pages have split the Romiòs into two antagonistic halves—long live all three.

  [1] The Roman imperial mantle on Greek shoulders has led to a splendid confusion; for the word “Rūm,” on Oriental tongues, referred not only to the Christian Byzantines—they are so styled in the Koran—but, for a century or two, to their conquered territory in Asia Minor; it designated the empire of the Seldjuk Turks in Anatolia with its capital at Konia (Iconium), reigned over by the “Sultans of Rūm.” To tangle matters still further the word Romania was often used in the West, especially during and after the crusades, to specify the parts of the Eastern Empire which lay in Europe; the Turks extended Rūm into “Rumeli,” (“land of the Rumis”) to cover the same area. One still finds the confusing word “Rumelia” on old maps. (In Greece, Rumeli now specifically applies to the great mountainous stretch of continental Greece running from the Adriatic to the Aegean, north of the Gulf of Corinth and south of Epirus and Thessaly.) The Turkish word for the ancient Greeks is “Yunan”—“Ionian”—and they now call Greece Yunanistan. The Greeks themselves thought of the Italians and the Western Catholics, especially after the schism had split Christendom into an Eastern and Western half—as the “Latins” —followers of the Latin rite—or, more generally, after the Crusades, as “the Franks,” a word still sometimes applied to north-western Europeans by both the Greeks and the Turks: inhabitants of Frankiá, or Frangistan.

  The most famous single use of the word rūmi is its appendage to the name of Mevlana Jellaludin, the great Moslem sage, mystic poet and the founder of the whirling Dervishes. For, though a Persian, he settled in Konia under the Sultans of Rūm.

  A final pitfall: none of all this must be confused with the Holy Roman Empire invented by Charlemagne and endorsed by the Pope in A.D. 800, and destroyed by Napoleon at the Federation of the Rhine. What an influence the idea of Caesar’s name has exerted on history! The Byzantines wore it by right, the Holy Roman Emperors adopted it. “Tsar” is a slav form of the same word, and, until recently, the Kings of England, as successors to the Great Mogul, bore the title of Kaisar-i-Hind.

  [2] As a concession for these services, Greek vessels from Hydra and the islands handled the entire carrying trade of the Mediterranean.

  [3] I mentioned the prevalence of this Greek characteristic a few days ago to Niko Ghika, the painter. He said: “They never do anything else.”

  [4] This is not quite true. I have heard it attempted, unforgettably, once, by an abbess in Mistra; uttered in a nasal and halting delivery and packed with marvellous blunders. It was very strange. Other cases exist, all of them cited and imitated as extreme instances of pedantic absurdity and always provoking laughter. It has the incongruity of Plato with a top hat and an umbrella.

  Yet it is impossible not to have a sneaking respect and liking for this hieratic mandarin language with all its euphuistic artificialities and its archaic syntax. Katharévousa has even been used now and then (a feat of unnatural virtuosity) as a medium for poetry; some of the poems of Calvos have a curious fabricated beauty, and there are elements of Katharévousa in Cavafy: cunningly placed bits of whalebone in the more sinuous demotic. It is elaborate and forbidding, but it is precise: indispensable, its champions say (which its opponents bitterly deny), for legal, scientific or mathematical definition. Katharévousa is an expensive faded leather case stamped with a tarnished monogram, holding a set of geometrical instruments: stiff jointed dividers and compasses neatly slotted into their plush beds. Dimotiki is an everyday instrument—a spade, an adze or a sickle—the edge thinned and keen with honing and bright from the whetstone; and the wooden shaft, mellow with sweat and smooth with the patina of generations of handling, lies in the palm with an easy balance. Partisanship for the two idioms has led to rioting in the Athens streets, to bloodshed and even death.

  [5] See page 68.

  [6] E.g. in solving the conundrum of a solitary foreign traveller, by regarding him as (a) an omniscient sage, (b) a millionaire, (c) a lunatic, (d) a spy. Sometimes all four simultaneously. See end of (32).

  [7] Sudden riches and the accumulation of luxurious and unfamiliar appliances and an alien set of social values are no more exempt from raw and barbaric blemishes than they are in other countries; but the assimilation is notably shorter and less painful.

  [8] A couple of months ago I was expounding this Dilemma theory to just such a Greek friend. He was entertained by the idea, and we were wondering what figure could symbolize the two warring principles. A wrestling match between Plato and Kolokotrones? We discarded this for a similar grapple between Pallas Athene and Psorokostaina (“Mangy Betty,” see Mani, page 208), the poor, ragged old woman who, in the early days of Greece’s liberty in the last century, became a satirical but affectionate nickname for the woebegone aspects of the new state. “I’ve got it!” my interlocutor said at last. “It would be Karayiozi’s eye peeping through the holes in a mask of tragedy!”

  [9] The event, which occurred in 1866, was celebrated by Swinburne in his poem about “rent Arkadion.”

  [10] They have nothing to do with the extinct horrors of brigandage. These customs are deplored by all except the very small minority who practise them; some villages have a very bad name. But the general attitude may be likened to the reciprocal cattle-reaving which held sway on the Scots and English border, or in the Highlands before their pacification. (The two atmospheres are related in more ways than one.) They are not in any way comparable to the sinister murders of the Mafia or the Camorra, which are rooted in squalid urban greed and enforced by terrorism. Most of the killers in American gang warfare are of Southern Italian and Sicilian origin, while the Greek contribution, as far as I can make out, is nil.

  [11] My godbrother Stephanoyanni Dramoudanis, killed in 1943. He had been arrested by the enemy for helping us. He made a break for it, with his hands tied behind his back, but was shot down as he leapt a wall.

  [12] Before beginning, all signed themselves with the cross, their thumb and two first fingers conjoined to honour the Tr
inity, the cross-bar going from right shoulder to left in the Orthodox way; and, at the meal’s end, before storing away any fragments of bread left over, they would kiss them in memory of the Mystic Feast.

  [13] Cretans of the towns and the lowlands who had abandoned this mode were referred to, with some scorn but more pity, as makrypantalonádes: “longtrousermen.”

  [14] The island was captured from the Byzantines by the Saracens of Spain in the eighth century, and turned into a nest of corsairs. Rather more than a century later they were driven into the sea; the island was seized for Byzantium again by Nicephorus Phocas and seven half-legendary princes. Here and there, especially in the south, one can detect a line of nose, a curl of brow, that may ultimately spring from this piratical sojourn.

  [15] The instrument is only to be found in Crete, but a similar one, though it is narrower in shape, used to be played by the Laz-speaking Greeks of Pontus, near Trebizond on the Black Sea in the confines of the Caucasus. One can still hear it now and then in those villages where Pontic refugees have been settled, mostly in Thrace and Macedonia.

  [16] E.g. my pretty goddaughter Anglia, child of Chariclea and Stephanoyanni Dramoudanis of Anoyeia. See p. 137 (note).

  [17] Father and father-in-law of old friends, Roxani and Shan Sedgwick.

  [18] 1859–1943.

  [19] See p. 44.

  [20] It is now strictly for internal use; not for foreigners, however fluent and seasoned. A few days ago, a blacksmith friend cut short the involved rigmarole of a customer with the words: “Pes to romeïka re adelphé, dia na se katalávoume” (“Say it in Romaic, brother, so we can understand”—meaning, “put it simply”). Later I asked him whether a passer-by were Greek, using the word “Romiòs”; and got a black look. Modern times have made it suspect in a stranger’s mouth; but, still more, the word is too loaded, precious and private for foreign use. I was an outsider usurping a secret family password.