The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  The three restored terraces well justify their existence, for it would be difficult without them to visualize how the whole area must have looked – the lowest terrace appears to have been the hospital, and the highest one the temple area. But even at its very oldest period, the site was several times enlarged before the Romans came on to the scene, so that as usual all the inscriptions are confused and tentative. There is a strange antique architrave just south of the main Aesculapion area, in which there was a spring named Bourinna by the private physician of Nero, a certain Andromachos of Crete. It is horrible to think that somewhere inside this sacred area there once stood statues of Nero, who so obligingly incarnated not only Aesculapius himself but also Hygeia and Epioni for the sculptor’s chisel. There is nothing like being a god. But let us leave these strange fragments of information and conjecture, so laboriously gathered together in the guide books. Whatever happens, do not miss the splendid views from the first long terrace; you can see as far as Bodrun (ancient Halicarnassus) on the Turkish coast and in fair weather even catch a glimpse of rugged Samos.

  There are several atmospheric villages worth a visit in the island, and some have medieval monuments or icons to show, but there is nothing you really should not miss. Pretty Kardamena will not disappoint, and if you climb to Asfendiou, you will at once consider the pleasures of buying a village house and spending a few years helping flowers to push up in some sheltered courtyard tiled with black-and-white sea-pebble.

  But it has got something, Cos, and can already claim a number of distinguished addicts; I know several people who come back for holidays year after year. A small story clings to the outskirts of my memory – about dreams. I have always longed to know more about Aesculapian healing and, in particular, about the function of dreams in the ancient medical system. In Epidaurus long ago, I came across a museum curator who told me that if you slept in the healing part of the Aesculapion you had confused and frightening dreams and nightmares. I wanted to experiment by camping in this spot alone for a month in summer in order to record dreams; but the war broke out and we were chased ignominiously into Egypt. What with the post-war difficulty of finding jobs in the Aegean, I never managed to secure for myself a Greek posting, and so Epidaurus had to wait. However, once when I was in Cos and visiting the Aesculapion on a sunny day in winter, I found a couple of soldiers camping in a bell tent among the ruins. I stopped for a brew-up and the traditional blow and harsh word. In the course of their chatter, they said that they had started camping inside the ruins but had slept so badly that they had moved their tent higher up and into the open where there was more wind. I asked if they had any special kind of dream – but no, it was just something about the place that had made them feel uneasy.

  The ladies of Cos were famous once for their beauty, and there are still handsome antelopes about today to keep the reputation of the Coan girls high in the esteem of the world.

  Before leaving the island you should visit, and indeed spend an afternoon drowsing under, the so-called plane tree of Hippocrates which, like some old boa constrictor, has completely entwined a whole square in its toils. It has sprouted arms and legs in all directions, and the kindly worshippers have propped up one limb after another, with stone columns, to prevent them breaking off. The tree spreads a deep shade when in leaf, and covers an extraordinary amount of ground. It must be extremely old, though perhaps not actually old enough to have existed in Hippocrates’ time. It shades a minute mosque of great charm, and indeed the enclosed place is one of the pleasantest and prettiest corners of this smiling island. I slept under the tree for two nights hoping that the spirit of the old god-physician might confer some of his healing powers upon me, but it was winter and all I achieved was a touch of rheumatism.

  Calymnos and Leros are almost Siamese twins, but there could not be two more contrasting places. Calymnos is big, blowsy and razor-shaven, yet open to the sea and sky and all their humours; Leros is a gloomy shut-in sort of place, with deep fjords full of lustreless water, black as obsidian, and as cold as a polar bear’s kiss. Leros means dirty or grubby in Greek, and the inhabitants of the island are regarded as something out-of-the-ordinary by the other little Dodecanese islands. They are supposed to be surly, secretive, and double-dealing, and in my limited experience I found this to be so. But it may be that uncomfortable winter journeys across the channel that separates them from their neighbours (it is a mile at its widest) result in their giving this impression, unfairly.

  Hop the strait to Calymnos, and the whole atmosphere changes; even the sky seems bluer. You are in the island of sponges now, and it is on this hazardous trade that the reputation of Calymnos depends today; throughout Greece, even in the main squares of Athens, you will find her sponges being marketed by old sailors or the widowed mothers of mariners lost at sea during the sponge seasons. Ovid saw Calymnos as ‘shaded with trees and rich in honey’. No longer; the hills are shaven as smooth as a turtle’s back, and the bare rock with its fur of hill garrigue has the slightly bluish terracotta tinge of volcanic rock. There is really nothing much to see except the fine harbour – where you will at once run into the island’s obsession with sponges, which will be lying out in quantities on the quays to dry, while squatting men darn their nets against the next foray. But since the turn of the century, they have had to go further and further away for their sponges, for the Aegean beds are no longer as rich as they were.

  Until the turn of the century, the traditional hunting ground for sponges was in and around these islands, particularly near Astypalea, though the men who embarked on this hazardous trade came from a number of different islands. Always the business itself seemed to be centered in Calymnos, possibly because of its excellent anchorage facilities and the storage space offered along its broad quays. Calymnos has remained the centre, even though now, with the diminishing sponge beds (not to mention the competition brought about by the invention of artificial sponges), hunters have to go much further afield and work at profounder levels. The dangers of sponge-hunting have been vastly increased by the need to dive deeper, for the old skin-diving technique has had to be replaced by costume-diving – and there is little money to spend on expensive, highly-sophisticated gear. Until recently, ancient diving-suits, long since condemned as unsafe by the British and French navies, were not uncommon, there were special diving-boats with air-pumps, and a glance at the ancient equipment still in use was enough to make the blood run cold. Perhaps now there exists some insurance against the hazards of this poetic trade; and the aqualung has made things easier. I hope so. Accidents are not infrequent, and you have to be a brave and hardy young man to adopt sponge-diving as a profession. Diving at increasing depth can also be responsible for the dreadful occupational disease of nitrogen bubble-poisoning of the blood, known as ‘the bends’. Calymnos town has a number of such martyrs, bent and twisted little men, old at forty, and thrown on the scrapheap of the labour market.

  It is hard to believe, when it reaches the bathroom, that the sponge is really an animal – a filter-feeding animal which propels water through the network of channels which go to make up its structure, feeding on the minute organisms which find their way into its toils. Some five thousand species exist, of every colour under the sun, but the richest and commonest variety is harvested in the eastern Mediterranean, with the Calymniot fleet playing a great part in the harvesting. About two hundred feet is average for sponge depths, although in the rich, old days there were beds sufficiently shallow to be plucked from a rowboat, with the help of a boathook or a grapnel. Nowadays it is a long burning journey to the coasts of Cyprus or Libya for a whole season, with a somewhat risky return to home base when the weather breaks. The ex-votos in the little local shrines and churches tell graphic and picturesque stories through crude little paintings of the dangers encountered and escaped – with the help of the patron saint, of course.

  The preparation of the captured sponges is sometimes done aboard, more often in greater comfort along the hospitable quays of the
harbour. The technique is to rot away the soft tissues and gradually press them out, rinsing repeatedly in seawater and then letting them air-dry. It is an exacting, somewhat boring operation, and quite smelly too.

  It is also somewhat startling to realize that sexual reproduction is the order of the day in all – or nearly all – species; and the sponge has almost as long and eventful a history as the Mediterranean itself. Even within the time-span of our own civilization, this useful little animal was a commonplace household adjunct in Greece and Rome. The servants in the Odyssey swabbed tables with it, while it was in great demand with artisans, who used it to apply paint, and with soldiers who had no drinking vessels to hand. In the Middle Ages, burned sponge was reputed to cure various illnesses. Together with olive oil it has been used from time immemorial as a contraceptive pessary by the oldest professionals – who, oblivious of the fact that they figure in the pages of Athenaeos, still flourish in the Athens Plaka today – using roughly the same sort of slang, in which the word ‘sponge’ finds many a picturesque use. Another out-of-the-way use for it was as a pad worn inside classical armour – one can see why.

  Venice secured such a firm monopoly over the sponge trade during the period of her ascendancy that the little object became known as a ‘Venetia’. According to Ernle Bradford, the two main marketable types today are called respectively the honeycomb and the cup – which refer to their shape. Artisans still find a use for real sponges as opposed to artificial ones, and in surgery they also have a function. But the trade is, if not declining, at least becoming a tougher and tougher problem for the Calymnos sailors. They must go further afield in their small boats, which have hardly changed in styling and size since the days of the Odyssey.

  I once saw the fleet setting out for Libya, and the sight was unforgettable, worthy of some great classical painter. We had come bumping and ballocking into harbour in the early afternoon to find everyone assembled on the quays – the wives and children all in their Sunday best. The boats had been waiting for the weather to break – there had been squalls and rain all day. The taverns were open and here and there sprouted a man with a glass in his hand, but the tension in the air, the pain of leave-taking, the heavy weight of the absence to be borne, the uncertainties and dangers to be encountered … everything was marked on the dark faces of the silent women. They were as still and undemonstrative as leaves, and the children holding their skirts looked up anxiously into their faces from time to time, as if to try to ascertain what their emotions might be, so that they could model their own behaviour on that of the grown-ups. A deep, instinctive sadness and concern reigned, a few jests and raucous exchanges by the men could not dispel the deep charm of sorrow which lay over the town. A church bell bonged and was silent. Oppressed by a feeling of poetic fatality – so ancient Greek in its vividness – we came ashore silently and sat on rickety chairs against the tavern wall to watch the departure. For already the signs of a lift in weather were apparent, and the dispositions of the fishing boats were such as to remind one of runners ‘on their marks’ waiting for the pistol. The tavern-keeper, a veteran whose diver’s palsy had driven him to retire at the age of thirty, served some cold octopus with red sauce and a fiery ouzo. But there was none of the usual chaffing and gossip. Some last-minute touches were being put to the nearest caique, and I saw their heavy wooden breadbin fully stocked with the dry biscuit, hard as rock, that is called paximadi. (Cyprus proverb: ‘The hardest biscuit always falls to the sailor with the fewest teeth.’) They would suck and gnaw these things all through the voyage, occasionally varying this stony diet with whatever they found in the ports where they touched – vegetables or lamb. Apart from paximadi, the basic shipboard food was chunks of pig fat, which were laid up in the lockers for use. A sinister taste this food has, too. But it must do the trick, for later in Yugoslavia my driver, who had been a local field peasant, produced what he said was a typical field worker’s midday meal: it consisted of a huge chunk of pork fat, a tilt of fiery slivovic and a brown crust of bread. In the snow it was excellent for stamina, but down in the Aegean? They live on nothing, the sponge fleets; one old man spoke of them with a rhetorical flourish as ‘men who suck their living from sponges as the sponges suck theirs from the tide’.

  The captains had not been wrong: a veil of dense, bluish light now fell over the harbour, the sun blazed out, and the most extraordinary calm began to fall and spread. On the horizon there were still some battle lines of sheep moving about, but the middle distance was already sighing its way back into stillness. One could smell that the night would be leaden calm, starless, humid and damp, but with only an oily swell to trouble about. Dawn would see them closing in to Crete, and with any luck they would next day sight Africa … There was a shout, and the leading vessel started to churn and sway, its engines started. More cries and gesticulations; the cavalcade assembled, bucking and stamping, and began to make its way towards the harbour entrance. On the quay, everyone stood quite still, like a Greek chorus, the blood quickened by the drama of this leave-taking with its burning emotions and its hazards. No bravado, though. The sailors turned back from time to time and waved, but nobody moved among the black-clad groups on the quay. Then, as the last boat rounded the ultimate spur, a tall, bearded sailor stretched out his arms and waved, immediately crossing himself, and at once in silence all our hands went up in a hieratic farewell. It was only after a hush, such as might greet the ending of some great piece of music, that one heard one or two sobs from the dark ranks of the women, and then the strident chatter of the children bubbling up irrepressibly as from some hidden spring of happiness. The sponge-fleet had put to sea. The quiet animation of relief set in now, and the taverns slowly filled up with the men left behind, mostly old seafarers or landworkers. For the women, the long wait of months had begun.

  Calymnos’s capital is an unprepossessing little place; the narrow streets have an untended look, and it is not surprising that it does not enjoy the suffrage of the tourists to anything like the extent of Cos in the south and Patmos in the north. The reason, I think, is that the inhabitants think of it as more a sponge-workshop than a place of residence; and their secret is that they all have little summer houses on the western flank of the island, for which, once the good weather arrives and the fleet departs, they abandon Pothia. Anyone who coasts the western shore will certainly appreciate their preference – it is full of deserted beaches and lonely bays, perfect for bathing-picnics or work on the Differential Calculus – not to speak of the Unified Field Theory. In this lambent, fine air, one feels the pulse-beat of the ancient pre-Socratic philosophers: men like Heraclitus, who first posed questions we are still trying to answer satisfactorily. It is pleasant to think of them lazing about, eating olives and spitting the pips into their hands, as they wrestled with questions which weigh down the human reason and the intuition alike. Here and there, on the firm gold sand, you will find the scribble of gulls’ feet and be reminded that the first blackboard of the thinker must have been the sand. Picking up a piece of driftwood, he thoughtfully drew a sacred triangle or a Pythagorean pentacle; all this long before papyrus was discovered and the scroll born.

  In this sort of island there is nothing much to do once the fleet has gone, so that you can always rent a boat or a small caique for a modest fee and explore the nooks and crannies of its piratical coastline. It is quite a good idea to do what Greek holidaymakers so often do, get yourself ‘marooned’ for a day or a weekend. Start by borrowing a sack and filling it with a couple of blocks of ice upon which to put your beer, wine, butter, and anything else which might turn with the heat. Strike a price with your boatman to carry you to the bathing beach of your choice and Crusoe you. But if you do this, do not forget to take an umbrella or parasol – even several of them. The stretch of heat from midday to sundown can turn a Nordic skin to roast pork and cost the unwary person a couple of days in bed with fever; it’s a fine way to ruin a holiday. Your boatman will return at evening to get you, and carry you home to har
bour at sundown, exhausted and happy and burning (in several senses) for a cold shower and an ouzo with ice, plus a slice of delicious cold octopus. There is nothing to compare with the sense of well-being after such a day – and it is all quarried out of frugality. Greece is a wonderful school for hoggish nations; you suddenly realize that you don’t need all the clobber of so-called civilization to achieve happiness and physical well-being. Just to think of a Paris menu, or a Los Angeles dustbin, fills one with shame, makes one queasy. How did we get to be this way – we pigs?

  One caveat, which you will learn from your Greek friends: don’t pay the boatman the full price, all in a lump. Pay an advance on the full price and the rest when you are safely home. I say this because some boatmen are forgetful creatures, and I am reminded of an occasion in Mykonos when a kindly American paid the whole fare to be Crusoe’d on Delos, without knowing that the boatman combined alcoholism with amnesia. He was stuck for the night; and when at last he got back, his boatman was found drunk in a tavern and asserted that he had never seen the American before in his life. Although this kind of forgetfulness is relatively rare, it is worth taking precautions.

  It is worth knowing, too, that in such a case you would certainly be able to secure redress by calling on the Tourist Police. They are a unique invention, as far as I know – a civil police force whose sole job is to watch over tourists, smooth out their difficulties, keep an eye on swindling prices. They have no criminal function, being a sort of garde champêtre, but they are very much up to the mark; and every morning they patrol the market, checking prices and running in tradesmen who try to smart-alec the tourist. In any question of altercation, you should not hesitate to call on them. They were invented by that wonderful man Karamanlis, the present Prime Minister – certainly the greatest Greek political figure since Venizelos. He also invented the marvellous new road system and the little government hotels called the Xenias. Those of us who have done Greece on foot, muleback, and in derelict, smoking buses, always covered in flea-bites, will never cease to bless the name of the man who has made everything so easy of access. It is not his fault that vulgar speculators have tried to ruin the atmosphere with the juke-box and transistor, with the so-called First Class Hotel – factors which only alienate the poor tourist who comes from a country where these things are manufactured, and is trying to get away from them.