The Greek Islands
Page 19
The tunnel which brought the water to the ancient town is certainly a fantastic feat of engineering, for its time. About a mile long, eight feet wide and eight high, it is still negotiable for most of its length. Some sections in the middle have caved in, but I was told that, with the help of a torch, one could still get through quite easily. I went halfway along it many years ago, to where there is a tiny Byzantine chapel, in which, mysteriously enough, the oil in the lamp seemed to be freshly poured. I wondered what sort of zealot or sacristan snaked down the dark tunnel to perform this votive act. It is something I have wondered many times in Greece. There are numerous remote, deserted chapels or hermitages, either on the tops of mountains as in Crete, or on the seashore surrounded by high cliffs so that they can only be reached by sea; yet I have hardly come upon one, however remote, which had not been recently dusted, and the oil in the altar lamps replenished by invisible hands. Little pagan wayside shrines keep you heart-whole in the Greek countryside; my own pet shrine to St Arsenius in Corfu is entirely cut off from the land by high cliffs, but it is always tended – one might suppose by spirits, for I have never glimpsed the tender. However, other shrines are modest in comparison with the temple built for the prayers of the tyrant; for Polycrates, nothing but the best would do. The original temple boasted 134 Ionic columns, and when it was burned down its successor was even larger. This gorgeous monument had the merit of affording work to the best sculptors and architects of the day, and doubtless deserved its ancient reputation as the finest thing achieved in the ancient world.
Because of its richness and ambiguous position, Samos has always been a pawn in the game of international politics, from the time the Spartans landed (and were soon replaced by Athenians), onwards. As a Roman province, she enjoyed a short period of stability and happiness, since Augustus liked the place and accorded it his favours. Then, still in Roman times, Antony sacked it. This cocktail-party playboy chose Samos for one of his greatest displays, a mammoth party, at which he was ably assisted by Cleopatra, and to which the whole civilized world was bidden; the feasting and debauchery went on for months. This was Antony’s way of starting a war – a kind of preliminary flourish, so to speak.
As for the famous Samian wine – find it who can, in the island of its birth. I suspect that one would have to know one of the great families of the island to taste it; the taverns do not have anything to justify its reputation. Yet it exists, that foaming cup that Byron was always ‘dashing down’ in a fever of petulance because Greece was not free. I have drunk it in several private houses in Athens, notably in that of the Colossus of Maroussi, who has it specially sent over the water (and from whose vinous disquisitions I have learned much of what I know about present-day Samos). There is also a Samos mastika, if you like anisette, which gives you the feeling of having been caught up in a combine-harvester and bundled out as trussed straw.
There is goodish upland-shooting in Samos during the winter months, and its wildness is commended by campers and walkers. You feel the wildness of Asia Minor in the air, and in the hazy distances sense the obscure, nomadic tribes on the mainland across the way, where huge and grumpy mountains lie like sofas out of work.
Chios is very different, though its size and geographical position are similar. The impression of desuetude is quite marked in the little capital town, and I think that earthquakes have been responsible for overturning its more precious architectural glories. A feeling of past luxuriance remains – smothered in dusty gardens full of oranges, lemons, pomegranates, flowering judases and cypresses; but the town has the kind of seediness that comes from business dealings. Yet it is a rich little island, which exports fruit, cheese and jams to Athens, and has made a speciality of the juice of the mastic plant which, according to the pious historians of hard liquor, was a gift from St Isidore – though what a self-respecting saint like Isidore was doing so far from his home territory in Salonika (his church is a treasure) I cannot tell.
The story of modern Chios is the story of this mastic plant. It is a plant that grows all over the Mediterranean, but only the Chiots have specialized in its cultivation, and developed it on a large scale. In addition to the drink, there is a pleasant white chewing-gum with a delicious flavour made from the plant. This has always been in great demand in the Turkish harems, since it combines the qualities of breath-sweetener and ordinary chewing-gum with helpful digestive and tranquillizing qualities. The plant is a relatively common one – Pistacia lentiscus – and one is surprised on looking it up in the encyclopedia to read: ‘The production of the mastic has been, from the time of Dioscorides, almost exclusively confined to the island of Chios.’ One suspects that the first big market for mastic was the seraglio, for at one time the whole trade passed into Turkish hands, and was re-financed. When I first reached Athens in 1935, the little tablets of mastic were in common use, but as time went on they were replaced by American chewing-gum which, though less refreshing, was considered more chic by the Athenians.
If the capital is somewhat depressing, one can find much to admire in the extraordinary green plain called the Campos, which is the source of the island’s present-day wealth. It lies some way from the town; and here the holdings and country houses of the rich families have congregated, to form an ensemble of great charm and originality which is, as far as I know, unique among the islands, even among the greenest such as Rhodes and Corfu. It is a romantic place, of shuttered gardens defended by great wrought-iron gates half-rusted black, and with tangled groves of citrus and olive stretching away up into the sky. And, like all such places, it is apparently tenantless. Empty houses, gardens without gardeners, weathercocks which do not turn on battered towers, dogs that crouch but do not speak. You can wander for hours in search of the Sleeping Beauty – so likely does it seem that she will be drowsing somewhere here – or else of Daphnis and Chloe, though it is not their island, strictly speaking.
The prevailing odour of dust and lemons and rock-honey is what you will most probably bring with you out of Chios. A more intrepid wanderer than myself, Ernle Bradford, has noted: ‘I can confirm that one can smell the citrus groves of Chios from the sea, specially if one arrives in the early morning, and there has been a dew-fall overnight. The fertile islands like Samos, Corfu and Rhodes, to mention but three, all have a definable smell.’ But you are more likely to experience this under sail during one of those lagging summer calms when your boat lolls and sways towards your landfall, hardly moving. And even before the smell the far creaking of cicadas will come across the water to you, like rusty keys.
The mastic villages in the south of the island are unremarkable save for their cultivated bushes of the herb, some six feet high, like the new-style French olive-trees which are cropped low, in the manner of tea-bushes. Incisions in the body of the plant bleed the mastic juice. The drink is still going strong, and you can still find the chewing-gum, though the trade in it is no longer what it was. Of the ‘submarine’ – that absurdity invented by the cafés to thrill its youngest customers – I have written elsewhere; it consists of a spoonful of mastic confiture plunged into a glass of cold water. The name in Greek means ‘an Underwater Thing’ and you see a very ancient Greek expression on children’s faces as they suck the white jam from the spoon. They are obviously in Disneyland, aboard the big submarine which is one of the marvels of the American scene.
As for Homer … of the seven cities which have contended, in the words of the old epigram, the claims of Chios to be his birthplace are well founded if one notes the reference in the Homeric Hymns to ‘the blind old man of rocky Chios’. In the north of the island, Kardamyla is supposed to be where he was born. Why not? There is a block of stone called ‘The stone of Homer’ outside Chios town which is more likely to be an ancient menhir or something of the kind. It reminds the visitor of the big block of Agrigento marble thrown down in a field outside the village of Chaos in Sicily: where the ashes of the great Pirandello have been scattered.
Nearby is Pashavrisi – or Pashasprin
g – which is rapidly becoming a summer resort of consequence. Good beaches with an eatable taverna to hand are not numerous in Chios unless you are adventurous and have time to cover a good distance by taxi. It is wise to use the taxi to visit the splendid monastery of Nea Moni, situated just below the crown of the mountain called Provatium. Splendour and isolation combine with a rich set of eleventh-century frescoes to make such a trip memorable. The frescoes were sadly jumbled by the great earthquake of 1881, though enough are still extant to provide a graphic notion of what they must once have been. With the new interest in Byzantine art as an aesthetic there is talk here, as elsewhere, of having them tactfully restored. The monastery has however fallen upon meagre days, and its once hundred-strong monkery is now reduced to a handful of lumbago-ridden mystics who are bored stiff with the scenery and the frescoes and are eager to have a chat with people from the outer world.
Some of the monks are ex-brigands – it is (or was) a convention in Greece that brigands, when they are getting on and have no pension, abruptly repent and become monks of great splendour. In most monasteries there is a brigand picture taken in the good old days when the ambushes and purse-slittings were good. The transformed brigand often has it framed and hung on the walls of his cell. I have seen a dozen of these pictures in various places in Greece, and the posture of the band has some of the diffident solemnity of a football eleven of adolescents. The camera has only recently been accepted in Greece; in the thirties it was widely regarded as a machine for casting the Evil Eye on people who were unwary enough to allow their souls to be snatched by the contrivance. I remember a group of monks on Mount Taygetus in Laconia running for shelter and ducking behind a rood screen as I unleashed my old Rolleiflex. After the last war, the superstition was conquered, and everywhere I was badgered by people – especially monks – to take their photographs. But some of the old fear still exists in the remote villages of Crete, where a peasant woman will shield her face, or else, having been snapped, will spit into her breast and repeat the magic formula against bewitchment. In the last century, before the daguerreotype was invented, draughtsmen who wanted human portraits ran into this problem in Greece, though it was not perhaps so ingrained here as in Moslem countries. Now you even meet people who have been photographed with Sophia Loren – which they rightly remember as a great event.
One of the great tragic events of the modern history of Chios is the massacre of 1822, which inspired some of Victor Hugo’s choicest rhetoric and a magnificent picture by Delacroix, a copy of which is to be found in the museum. The little islet of Psara, which lies quite near, was similarly devastated by the Turks and inspired a lapidary poem by Solomos, who wrote the national anthem for the Greeks. The two most uplifting and noble national anthems are the Greek and the French, which embody the feelings of an entire epoch and a whole race. Other national anthems seem dead by comparison. Listen to the Greek one sung with the words. The only song in English which comparably ignites the heart and uplifts the soul is the Blake oratorio ‘Jerusalem’. Even Mozart could do nothing memorable with ‘God Save the King’, though he meant to pay a compliment, for he admired England (because of Hume).
The history of Chios is not significantly different from that of the neighbouring islands. The same succession of piratical nations have held it, alternatively sacking it or securing for it a few years of peace and prosperity. For such a pretty island, it is odd that its image is more industrial than romantic. You feel that both Samos and Chios were always stepping-stones to the continent; even in winter, they were not blocked up by heavy seas as the central group of Cyclades are even to this day. They traded in winter; and of course once on the mainland, the islanders easily touched the tail end of the spice routes and the caravan highways to India. Hence a certain sophistication of outlook, which they shared in ancient times with Lesbos. Nowadays, the rich absentee landlords prefer Paris or London as a place of residence; but summer brings them back.
In its respect for the seasons the pattern of Greek life is constant. Families, even in ancient times, possessed a little house or a big property by the sea. Here they set up shop for the sunny weather, held court and invited all their friends and their children. I remember one holiday on an island, where I had arrived with letters of introduction to an old lady of wealth and distinction, an obscure, Venetian countess who still guarded her long-extinct title. The family was just loading up to go to the summer property which lay on the other side of the island. I was at once invited to join them – a merry band of cousins and aunts and uncles, with their children, and hampers loaded with enough food to sink a ship. The setting-off was impressive. Seven or eight fiacres or gharries were lined up at the door and solemnly loaded with all that might be necessary for three or four months’ stay on the other side of the island. The country property was a fine, unkempt old villa with wrought-iron gates which squeaked abominably; it was pitched on a headland above a lion-coloured beach. Two mad monks were the caretakers, one deaf and one lame; they fed the pigeons and kept the hunting dogs in trim.
I set off with my hosts – the long line of fiacres raising a white plume of dust along the white roads. The trip took about two hours, not more. We moved like a column of infantry, with the old lady in the leading fiacre. We were waved goodbye by the grandmother, who had supervised the loading with great care, standing on the steps clicking the house-keys in her hand and admonishing, criticizing, or praising. (She kept the food-cupboards well locked and every morning dished out supplies for the day.) The grandmother was staying behind but would be coming over to join us and take up her family duties in the other house within a couple of days. The baggage-train contained everything necessary for the family’s health and well-being in the weeks to come – toys, pets, nannies, cutlery, pots and pans, phonographs, a boat, easels and colours, and even a small upright piano, which occupied a fiacre to itself and jogged contentedly along behind the column uttering from time to time a plangent whimper. (On the morrow a piano-tuner would ride across the island and set it to rights in its new abode.)
By the time we arrived, the country house had been reactivated, for the servants had walked across the island during the night and warned the mad monks. The rooms had been opened up and aired, beds made, staircases dusted, gutters, swollen with winter leaves, unplugged. Even the beds were made, with fine old linen sheets which smelled of lavender, and the dusty mirrors cleaned and angled. There had also been a huge delivery of ice-blocks, which were stacked in the improvised freezer – a sort of underground room or crypt, whose walls were insulated with the pulped flesh of the prickly pear. (For ordinary daily purposes, wine and butter were simply put down the well in a hamper.) Meanwhile, way below, in the sunken garden full of delightfully bad statuary, the blue sea prowled and sighed, impatiently waiting for its children and their boat.
The form of this summer migration has varied little throughout the centuries, though of course some details are different (today, for example, there is a refrigerator, either electric or, for remoter places, paraffin-operated). When you read of Nausicaa playing ball on the beach and discovering the naked Odysseus in the bulrushes, or of Sappho going into the country with her maids, this is the sort of background to events. No piano, of course, but Sappho would have taken the harps and lutes necessary for her summer symposium, including the little one she invented.
The tradition, however modified, will continue, one feels, as long as the Greek summer remains what it has always been – hot, dry, touched by the island winds at sunset, and then cool-to-cold at night, with a sky of such clear brilliance that you can lie for hours watching it breathe, counting the shooting stars as they cross and recross the darkness, and then watching the Pleiades rise like the tiny horns of new born lambs or the first flowers opening upon the spring. On such occasions, one is aware of the big silences of the philosophers whom we have followed but never superseded, those men so deeply conscious of the slow-burning fuse of death which invisible fingers had lighted on their first birthday.
In islands like these, one mentally thinks back to visitors who have already been here and left us a record of their impressions; sometimes they were not poets but business men or sedate travellers moving about for their health. All such impressions are precious, for they mark the passage of time for us. An example is that fabulous globe-trotter Lithgow who, after almost twenty years of trotting, left a monumental record of his journeys – as invaluable as it is lively, though there is not much humour in it. The Total Discourse of the Rare Adventures of William Lithgow is a great travel book, written with pain and conscience, and providing a graphic account of travel in the Mediterranean during the seventeenth century. Himself rather a curious bird, Lithgow had every reason to stay abroad and indulge an induced perambulatory paranoia. He was caught behaving in an undeclared, amorphous manner with a pretty village girl who unfortunately had five disapproving brothers. In their quiet, undemonstrative, Scots way they lopped his ears and drove him from the parish to bury his humiliation in foreign parts. The locals called him ‘cut-lugged’ because of his cropped ears. Shame drove him to travel. One always thinks of him in Chios because he has left us a description of the island, whose women, he avers, are of exceptional beauty: ‘The women of the city of Scio are the most beautiful dames or rather Angelical creatures of all Greeks upon the face of the earth, and greatly given to venery. Their husbands are their panders, and when they see any stranger arrive, they would presently demand of him whether he would have a mistress; and so they make whores of their own wives.’ Although this may well have been true in the seventeenth century, it is difficult to imagine in the sedate Chios of today. There are a few nightclubs here and the sort of night-life which in its modest way attracts Nordic tourists – and why not, when the nights are so fine and crystal clear, and the sky like old lace? It seems a crime to go to bed early in Greece, and even the little children are allowed up very late, so that when they turn in they really sleep a dead-beat sleep, instead of spending the night whining and sucking their thumbs as so many northern children do. All habits, of course, stem from climate which, in a subtle, unobtrusive manner, dictates everything about the way we live, and often about the way we love.