The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  *

  The Germans had almost reached Kalamata when a consular caique appeared and proposed to offer us a safe passage to Crete and thence to Egypt. We left by night and travelled right down the stony sleeve of the Mani, until we reached the very end just as dawn started breaking. By extraordinary good fortune, throughout this whole adventure we had an April sea of silk, while the nights were starless and without moon. The vessel was crowded with refugees like ourselves, a number of them British, and was a defective old tub slightly down to port. The real danger however was that her wheezy engine uttered showers of bright sparks up into the sky.

  Cape Matapan (ancient Taenaron) was the very last toe-hold on the peninsula; after that the black bitumen of the night sea which took us to Cythera. It was a poor harbour, indeed hardly one at all; but the divine stillness of the sea made it safe. The whole village came down to see us as we tied up. They had all the reserve and pride of the Maniots – the proudest of Greeks, for their peninsula has never been conquered by a foreign nation – but they were hungry for news. Cut off like this by the mountains, there was no contact with the outside world except one little radio which had died on them. We were in hardly better case, but we shared what news we had from the stricken Kalamata we had left. We had to wait for dusk again before tackling the next leg of the voyage, and I remember in what calm and ease we passed that day – reorganizing ourselves, tidying up the boat, checking provisions and so on; then swimming and washing and sunbathing on the warm pebbles. The whole world seemed to be in a state of suspended animation, the whole turning, sunlit globe. No sign of aircraft, nothing upon the sea. The bountiful peacefulness of that day had a dream-like flavour. Towards evening our hosts proposed to feast us before we left with the darkness. The last two lambs of the village had been killed; tables were laid down the main street as if for a wedding. So we sat in the warm, buoyant, late sunlight and toasted each other calmly and with love, for we did not expect ever to see each other again. It was a typical Greek feast in this classic simplicity and formality. Boys of rifle-bearing age (around fourteen) were seated with the grown-ups. A few conventional expressions of hope and good cheer were uttered by individuals, but there were no prepared speeches. Yet our hearts were full. Where did it come from, this smiling calm, this simple confidence, this warmth of plenitude? We had no right to feel like this, for the world had come to an end. Why then this happy fulfilment of quiet talk and laughter?

  The reason is that a word had been uttered, a single small word for which the whole of Europe had waited and waited in vain. It was the word ‘No’ (Ohi) and Greece had uttered it on behalf of all of us at a time when the so-called great powers were all cringing, fawning and trying to temporize in the face of the Hitlerian menace. With that small word Greece found her soul, and Europe found its example. A small, almost unarmed nation, internally self-divided, once more decided to defy the Persian hordes as it had done in the past.

  I think we were filled with a secret relief that at last the word had been uttered, for it brought us the certain knowledge that now, however long the war took, and however many of us did not return from it, it would finally be won. It was the premonition of that distant victory and return of peace which filled us with such tranquil happiness. As dusk began to fall, we took our leave of this little faraway village, cut off from everywhere by its ring of mountains. They waved us goodbye with the same smiling certainty as they had shown all day. The sun was just below the rim of the horizon, the world was sinking through veil after veil of violet dusk towards the sheltering darkness.

  There came a shriek. ‘Look!’ Wildly, one of the crew pointed up into the sky above us, and we craned our necks to see a flight of Stukas in arrowhead formation moving above us. Instantly the skipper turned the boat in under the high cliffs where it would present a difficult target for dive-bombers. There was a moment of high excitement and near panic; but it ended in roars of laughter, for the wretched aircraft above us turned out on closer scrutiny to be an arrowhead formation of wild duck, doubtless heading southward to Egypt for their familiar haunts on Lake Mareotis. The darkness came now, the night became chill, and we turned in a little ashamed of our panic. At dawn we wallowed into Cythera.

  Here we ran into a group of deserters from the Albanian armies, mostly Cretans, who were in an ugly mood. Their craft had fallen apart just as it reached harbour and was a total wreck – indeed how they had got so far was a mystery, no less a mystery than the route they had taken. There they were, lying among the rocks like mastiffs dressed in bloody rags and soiled sheepskins. They were armed too, which put us at a disadvantage during the long diplomatic discussion that followed. They proposed to take our boat and maroon us on Cythera. They had urgent work to do in Crete, they said, they had to execute a traitor, a general, whose name I forget. It took us nearly all day to dissuade them from this course, pleading our women and children as an excuse. Finally they relented and allowed us to go, provided we took three of their badly wounded fellows, which we did. But we cleared the harbour bar rather smartly, long before time, lest these grumpy warriors should change their tune.

  Mercifully we were neither bombed nor machine-gunned, though a number of boats quite near were. The darkness was alive with boats heading for Crete; you could hear the drumming of their engines, and here and there you might see a spark of light from a cigarette. In comparison, we were almost a travelling firework display, and it is a wonder we were not marked down for machine-gunning. Tired and cramped and folded up like soiled towels, we at last climbed ashore at Chanea to stretch our cramped legs. The town was full of troops in various stages of undress and disarray, and in the far distance some mild rifle-shots echoed and subsided in a desultory, haphazard sort of way, as if some idle boy were shooting at rooks. Once again, despite the relative commotion, the movement of soldiers and so on, there was a sense of hiatus, of suspended animation. I set about finding lodgings, a decent enough berth for my wife and daughter, with some kindly Cretans who were delighted that we spoke a little Greek. There were a few air raid alerts and, I suppose, a few air raids; but the planes were not over us – they were after Suda where the old York lay right over on her side, with only one viable gun slanted up at the sky. However, a lot of the muck sprayed down over the town in the form of sparrow-shot and shrapnel; we could hear it clattering upon the tin roofs of the tavern lean-tos when we were having a quiet ouzo. Nor were the elements of Grand Opera lacking at this moment, for not only was the King on the island with his entourage, but also the Greek Government, whose Minister of Interior I saw emerging from a hole, clad in a tin helmet and looking like a giant rat. (With them of course would be Seferis the poet.) In fact the whole of Athens was there, and despite anxiety there was a slight feeling of euphoric fiesta in the air. All my friends were there, and I kept meeting them, either improbably clad (Peter Payne in a digger hat) or manifesting a sang-froid which was rather out of place (Alexis Ladas in beautifully cut riding-breeches).

  We were finally carried out into safety by an Australian transport, which appeared in some miraculous fashion as evening began to fall and proposed that we should go aboard with the coming of night. It was to be my first farewell to this vehement island with its rugged beauties and ruggeder men.

  It was in a street of Chanea – I was hunting for some Carnation Milk for the baby – that I came upon a detail of some Greek regiment busy about some internal matter of proper equipment. They were shortening webbing or something like that, and all at once I saw the bronze form of the Paris statue from the Athens Museum; the same pose, the same stance. Moreover it had the outstretched hand, though now this was not empty; nor was it to Aphrodite, but to his fellow soldier that he was proferring, a Mills bomb. This sight somehow assuaged and illuminated the faint disappointment I had felt about the empty hand of the statue. I felt vaguely that there might be a worthwhile short story in it; but I have never been able to manage the short story form, so it had to go on slumbering in a note book or in my memory until now,
when I produce it here in its unfinished state.

  In the morning we were in Egypt.

  Santorin

  It is hardly a matter of surprise that few, if any, good descriptions of Santorin have been written; the reality is so astonishing that prose and poetry, however winged, will forever be forced to limp behind. Perhaps only in the more fanciful reaches of science fiction will you find anything quite like this extinct volcano of white marble, which blew its head off at some moment in the Bronze Age, and must, by the most reasonable modern assessments, have partially destroyed, or at least deeply modified, a rich and elaborate culture of the Cretan type. The tidal wave alone must have caused floods as far away as Syria and Spain, while the rain of volcanic ash, the scholars surmise, may have been what finished off the Minoan civilization once and for all. Such theories are not mere fanciful suppositions – the most modern scientific evidence goes far to support them. And Crete is only sixty miles away. If the craters of Milos and of Nisyros, both of them extinct volcanoes, contributed secondary bursts, the whole Mediterranean must have been affected. All early traditions speak of a world-engulfing flood at some early time. As for Plato’s Atlantis – traditions of which came to him perhaps from Egypt – nobody who visits Santorin today can help being half-convinced by the relatively modern theory that it was here that it was situated.

  What happened? A deep fault in the earth’s surface opened, and with a roar the whole sea was siphoned into it directly on top of limitless beds of molten magma, the earth’s core, causing an explosion of steam which was prodigious. It was the size of the eruption which counted – for there exists much early evidence of volcanic activity, recorded by the seismologists and historians of all epochs. Strabo records one in 196 BC, when a whole island was thrown up. Later again, in 1570, the island of Mikra Kaumene and, in 1770, Nea Kaumene, lifted themselves into the air. And once you sail into the huge bowl which the Santorin explosion created – eighteen miles round the inner rim – you find yourself confronted with something quite unlike the rest of the Cyclades. The smell of sulphur and the pit still seems to hang in the air, giving a diabolical flavour to the scenery which, without too much imagination, could conjure up a backdrop suitable for a stage hell. Chunks of pumice still float about and knock against your hull, as if broken off still warm from some sudden push of white-hot lava thousands of fathoms below. And then the cliffs, which rear up with their ravaged-looking ghost town on the crest – where has one ever seen such colours, seen rock twisted up like barley-sugar, convoluted and coloured so fancifully? They remind one of the oil marbling on the endpapers of Victorian ledgers. Mauve, green, putty, grey, yellow, scarlet, cobalt … every shade of heat from that of pure molten rock to the tones of metamorphic limestone cooling back into white ash. And off the crest, like the manes of horses, little spurts of white ash drift down into the bay from the silent white houses. Sunset and sunrise here put poets out of work. The lines of men apparently carrying immense rocks on their shoulders are only handling pumice which is as light as air.

  As far as the creation of the island is concerned, the modern scholar has a useful yardstick in Krakatoa, where the largest volcanic convulsion in recent history provided measurable data for study: it occurred in 1883. The shock wave produced by Krakatoa was fifty feet high and it destroyed towns and villages hundreds of miles away from its epicentre. To compare this with Santorin, I quote a modern writer whose authoritative and carefully argued book will provide the traveller with all the arguments that I must briefly summarize here: ‘The Santorian caldera (the deep cauldron-like depression of a volcano) is thirty-two miles in surface, and 160 to 220 fathoms in depth. It is therefore five times greater in volume than that of Krakatoa; the thermal energy produced was therefore about three times that of Krakatoa … Occurring in the middle of the Aegean, a relatively densely populated centre of Bronze Age civilizations, it could hardly have been forgotten …’ (Atlantis by Galanopoulos and Bacon, 1969.)

  Approaching from the north, you first touch the island at Oia, where there is no real harbour; all landing has to be done by bumboat, as our grandfathers used to call it. The real capital, perched on its glittering white crest, lies midway down the island, right opposite the smaller island of Therasia. The whole assemblage is composed of the scattered volcanic fragments of the marble mountain after its eruption, and indeed there are still frequent twists of smoke and ripples of water-surface around the two smaller and most recent islands, while the sea itself seems, if not actively to smoke, at least much warmer than the rest of the Aegean. The yachtsman feels uneasy when he decides to anchor for a few nights – to wait for full moon, say, when Santorin glimmers like the City of the Dead in Cairo under the cold, flaring white light. It also smells of the devil, and consequently it is no surprise that in the modern folklore of Greece peasant superstition has picked on the island as a specially favoured home for the vampire. Vampires in retirement, vampires who have shot their bolt, vampires wanting to get away from it all – they find a haven here. In fact in the demotic, there is a saying which closely parallels our own proverb about taking coals to Newcastle. ‘He who takes vampires to Santorin’ is performing a particularly redundant function. There is almost no shade on the blazing escarpment where the present capital lies. There is also precious little agriculture, apart from small tomatoes; and the vines which produce a characteristic volcanic wine containing just a suspicion of fizz, a pétillant spark of life that sets it apart from most of the red wines of the Cyclades.

  The town is nine hundred feet above the jetty where one lands, and where a draggle of surly mules awaits to hoist visitors up a seemingly endless staircase into the sky; a staircase with many a perilous zigzag from which you find yourself staring down into the turquoise eye of the sea below. It is an adventure.

  The old Atlantis Hotel has been pitched in a perfect strategic position on the top, and here you can restore your shattered nerves with a pleasant ouzo or brandy, drunk while gazing into the middle distance of a view, the like of which … It is so much the high spot of the Cycladean journey that even rhapsody is out of place, as it must be when one is dealing with a real experience, an Event and not a mere Happening.

  The superstitions of the place make you feel that something lingered behind after the great explosion and disappearance of a whole culture. More than vampires, there are ghosts in the island about which it would not do to be ironic. Here is a peasant’s account of them taken from Voyage To Atlantis (Mavor):

  Evangelos Baikas of Akrotiri had this comment to make upon the excavations just concluded. He said: ‘This summer my family could not work in the fields because of the ghosts. In the mountain that came from the sea there are ghosts where now they make excavations. I saw them. One morning when I went to collect the tomatoes and it was not yet sunrise a big white light covered a great ghost, covered with a shield. There were many, all in movement, yet they looked firm. They went toward the sea in the direction opposite from the sunrise to escape from the light which goes towards the west.’

  This is almost on an Irish note, and in much the same key. Lawson, that admirable folklorist, records finding an old lady making rain up on the mountain, and he noted down some of her pious incantations. She discussed the matter quite reasonably with him in a matter-of-fact tone, but admitted that it was easier to make rain start than to get it to stop. And thunder was quite beyond control – could he help? He must have been the first Oxford don to be asked to make rain and control thunder. There are witches and apparitions in plenty on this strange island. A friend of mine tells me that when she was a child, she spent a holiday near Thera (the capital) and one day the peasants called out to her to come quickly and see a little man who was hiding in an olive tree and playing on an instrument. They surrounded the tree and three or four people attested to the existence of a ‘devil’ or a kalikanzaros. My friend could not see him, but she heard the faint quirky music of a pipe, and also the clicking of his little hooves in the branches. Then he jumped down and the
y all fled screaming.

  A visit to ancient Thera calls for stamina and a touch of intrepidity; it is muleback and walking for some three hours – or you can drive as far as Pyrgos, which is pretty, though the last earthquake knocked it about somewhat. The ancient site, itself also some thousand feet above the sea, lies on the east coast on the exposed flanks of a barren range. From the very top on a clear day one can see Crete.

  I do not think ancient Thera alone would justify a visit to the island, although it is impressive; but the Delos temples, though smaller in scale, have greater atmosphere. The reigning divinity of the place was not the Delian but the Dorian Apollo, in whose honour the festivities of the youth took place. Apollo Kourotrophos, the ‘boy raiser’, was the patron of the palaestra. The celebration was called the Gymnopaidia. A few inscriptions and epithets have a slightly questionable ring to a Protestant mind – though Seferis the poet, who was not particularly interested in naked boys, wrote a beautiful long poem about the event, as classical as a star. Once up here, in this brilliant light, it is worth treading the Sacred Way and trying to imagine how life was once lived in this windy fastness, so high above the sea. On one of the walls, you may be amused to see a highly serviceable-looking phallus engraved and, under it, the inscription ‘To my Friends’ … Surely this is the best bequest one could give or receive in the name of friendship?