The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  Skiathos used to have a prosperous naval yard which turned out a number of small craft each year, but I am told the trade is in decline thanks to the development of the Piraeus shipbuilding industry. Skiathans, however, still make the traditional type of caique known as trechandiri, from the word trecho meaning ‘to run’. These are elegant little caiques, with a peculiar kind of pouting prow, and are really much speedier than the broad-bottomed, run-of-the-mill caique, which tends to wallow and yaw when full of cargo. I heard an owner ordering one and talking about the slips at Skiathos where it would be assembled. Apparently it was cheaper to have the job done in Skiathos than in Athens.

  Skopelos, such an odd shape on the map, is no favourite of mine; but it deserves a note because its little town, which whorls its way up round an amphitheatre shaped like a helix, is a pleasant place to pass an afternoon. If you are in a restless mood you will be soothed by the information that there are apparently 360 churches on the island, and at least 120 in the capital. When the inhabitants suffer from insomnia they count, not sheep (for there are none on the island) but churches. The sailing hereabouts is windy and capricious, and the pleasantest place for an excursion is a little fishing village over the hills called Agnonda. But on the whole it is a pleasure to take to the wind-swept sea once more, and hammer down the forty-odd miles to the south-east from Skopelos, until one heaves-to in Tris Boukes of Skyros – or Trebuki Bay – a good anchorage in a sound almost sealed by little islets. Here died Rupert Brooke during World War I, aboard a French hospital ship, of typhoid fever.

  The poetic Brooke legend has become modified and diluted by time, but something tangible remains. As an adolescent, like everyone else I idolized him, but even now, though the blind idolatry has waned, I still respect and admire much of his work. It was good work for his time, and considering the influences he underwent; and we should beware of fashion, that fickle jade. (Remember that for seventy years after his death Shakespeare was almost forgotten.) Brooke is buried in an olive grove about a mile from the shore – a picturesque enough spot; but it is a devil of a walk in the heat, part of the way leading up a stony wadi that is more reminiscent of the Cairo desert than a Greek isle. April 1915 was the date of the burial, and for some time little attention was paid to the grave, which became pleasantly overgrown and mossed up. Then, in 1960, the Navy obtained permission to tidy up the precinct and enclose it in railings, all newly whitewashed and painted and shipshape. This was all to the good. Ernle Bradford was shocked to find that Greek trippers had scribbled their names over the tomb when last he was there; but he reflects reasonably enough: ‘My first reaction was one of indignation, but then I remembered Byron’s name carved in the marble of Sunion – if Byron on Sunion why not Anagnos and others on Brooke’s tomb in Skyros?’ Why not indeed?

  Tourists never change; sometimes, though not often, their inordinate desire to share the immortality of a great personage turns out to be useful – though not often. I am thinking of tourist scribbles of this kind upon the ancient monuments in Egypt. I have forgotten the exact context, but there is a famous monument (Karnac?) which proves the presence of Greeks in a certain place at a certain period; Kilroy had left his moniker scratched in the ancient stone. In Byron’s case, it seems obvious that he did not groove his name himself at Sunion, for it is not his hand and nothing like his signature. What happened was this: after a heavy dinner, washed down with a fine red Naoussa, his host, overcome with emotion at having the great poet at his table, called for a mason and ordered him to engrave a memento on one of the pillars of Sunion. It takes some finding today, and it is fair to suppose that Byron would not have indulged in such sacrilege by himself; but as a guest what was he to do? However, the unfortunate result is that Smith and Jones have rushed in with uninhibited zeal to claim their own slice of immortality, and the whole of the Sunion temple is a mass of graffiti today, thick as lace.

  Brooke’s more modest tomb is now spruced up in fair naval fashion, and the railings will prevent graffiti accumulating. In town, one can inspect the epicene sculpture erected to his memory, and note that during the troubles in the 1950s in Cyprus the people of Skyros were sufficiently stirred up with patriotism to rename the little square where it stands, ‘Cyprus Square’ – something of a backhander for the British. I was also told that the nude youth in the sculpture caused a certain amount of middle-class distaste among the nicer sort of people in the capital. Well, it is epicene, but to feel shocked by a nude is surely rather out of date. What remains is the presence, in this finely classical island, of an English poet who somehow managed to symbolize the sentiments of a nation as it embarked on a world war; and the presence still echoes on in the memories of the old – though by now the palimpsest has been overlaid with images from a more recent war on a more terrible scale. The olives hereabouts are very silent about the matter – trees are not moralists. Their shade heals and forgives human folly; besides, the trees of Skyros have seen other heroes from older civilizations.

  Did I mention only two shades? I lied, for there are three, and I kept the most important up my sleeve, because he is the only one who offers me an anecdote with which to close the chapter on this little group of islands. Achilles!

  The sombre shade of the young warrior hangs over the tale of Troy, all because of a prophecy that he would conquer it but be prematurely killed. At nine years old, he was handed over to the centaur Chiron – a rum sort of tutor to have. He was nourished with the entrails of bears and the marrow bones of lions and other animals. A poetic gloom seems to lie over his character, and one hesitates to ascribe it to sustained indigestion. Like Luther. But the vein of poetry and sadness is real. His mother, Thetis, knew of the prophecy and could not bear the thought of an early death for him. She disguised him as a girl and sent him to the court of Lycomedes, hoping in this way that he would escape the fate decreed for him. It was the wrong way to try to meddle with his karma, and can only have increased his sense of inadequacy. Achilles is a brooding figure and even his great exploits in the field have a tragic flavour. At any rate, whatever his feelings were while he was disguised as a girl, Odysseus guessed at the truth and, by an ingenious trick, forced him to reveal himself. Arriving at the palace with a gift of trinkets and baubles for the women of the household, Odysseus placed a sword and shield among them. Then he ordered an alarm to be sounded without. The women rushed for their presents but Achilles, by a conditioned reflex of which Chiron would have approved, seized sword and shield and put himself in a posture of defence. The discovery proved to him that one cannot cheat destiny; he quietly gave in and joined forces with Odysseus. Skyros saw him no more, and from henceforth he belongs to poetry. His valour outside the walls of Ilion is on public record now – the combat with Hector is one of the great hand-to-hand battles of the world. But his fatal heel … Before Troy fell, he was pierced in this vulnerable member by an arrow, fired either by Paris or by Apollo, which caused his downfall and death. He made this as costly and spectacular as befitted a superstar – even facing the invulnerable warrior Cycnus, whom he strangled with the strap which secured his helmet; though, when Achilles tried to despoil him of his armour, the defeated Cycnus suddenly got himself turned into a swan.

  The tomb of Achilles in Sigaeum, according to Pliny, was one over which no bird ever flew, so strange and ominous was the atmosphere which brooded over it.

  The present Acropolis of Skyros is the most probable site for the palace of the legendary Lycomedes, who arranged the death of Theseus. There is some suggestion that the murdered man had some ancestral land in the island, but this is not certain. At any rate, after Marathon when the ghost of Theseus appeared in the ranks of the Athenian forces, the omens were read, and an embassy was sent to bring back his remains for burial in Attic earth. His festival, the Theseia, was thenceforward celebrated on 21 October. One wonders if this could be the actual day on which his murder took place?

  These three, then, are the somewhat inconclusive shades which haunt the silences of th
e olive glades on Skyros. It would not, however, be an island to retire to, like Corfu or Rhodes, but one could sleep away (and swim away) a memorable summer or two here, and the lack of tourist amenities even to this day would secure your solitude – if that is what you came here to look for.

  The Cyclades

  *

  Naxos and Paros

  This is not the first time that Naxos and Paros have been presented together, nor will it be the last. They seem to coexist in the mind as being of comparable charm and magnitude. But there are several radical differences. Naxos is a bit of a slut, while Paros is all gold and white like her once famous marbles. If Naxos is a vivid parrot, then Paros is a white dove. You wake earlier in Naxos, but you sleep deeper in Paros.

  ‘The Cyclades is one corner of the map where the word “seduction” applies with more appositeness than anywhere else on earth. Yet so many of them could with justice be called just sterile rocks; but in the heart of the Grecian sea, where the gods have scattered them, these humble rocks glimmer like precious stones.’ Thus Gobineau, who wrote a fine novel about the islands called Akrivie Phragopoulo, which gives an admirable portrait of the Greece of a century ago. ‘The islands coming up – there lies Paros with its sister Antiparos; a bit further on, in the haze, Santorin; and then, straight ahead, Naxos – lovely Naxos with its hills and valleys and gorges appearing slowly out of the smoke.’ With all his French lust for colour, he notes the dawn light shifting from nacre to saffron, from lilac to rose … but it would be several hours yet before they reached her, as the wind was slack and the sails drooped. The two islands are separated by only five miles of water – but here you are travelling across the prismatic heart of the Greek sea. If a dolphin does not rise and wink at you, or a quiver full of flying fish swirl across your bows, you can ask for your money back. Particularly in the late spring. And the presence of so many famous islands so near to you, softly girdling the confines of the seen world, has a cradling effect – your imagination feels rocked and cherished by the present and the past alike. The very names of the islands are like a melody.

  Naxos is the largest and most fertile of the whole Cyclades group, and this despite earthquakes and new islands emerging, as near Santorin, seems to have happened pretty constantly since that wayward god Dionysus adopted the island, and fell in love with the sleeping Ariadne on one of Naxos’s remoter beaches. Here, once more, we lift a curtain upon a corner of the perplexing Cretan Minotaur theme – for Ariadne, the daughter of Minos and of Pasiphae, was the girl whom Theseus married after she had helped him fulfil his bull-slaying mission in the depths of the labyrinth. Aphrodite perhaps had something to do with the matter, for Theseus was under her protection, and it was she who arranged for Ariadne to love the youth, and finally to succour him, thanks to the magic ball of twine which Daedalus had given her before he left the island. With this slender marker Theseus managed to enter the darkness and navigate surely in the corridors of the labyrinth, so that when at last he emerged, having killed her monstrous half-brother, the girl Ariadne, by now hopelessly in love, fled with him in all haste from the Cretan capital.

  On the way back to Athens their ship touched at Naxos – which incidentally was not on the direct route at all – and it was here that Theseus, so mysteriously, abandoned his bride and left the island alone. One wonders about his state of mind – had the terrible experience of the Minotaur disturbed its balance? Why should he leave poor Ariadne so abruptly? The fact that he forgot to hoist the appropriate flag on arrival in Athens, and thus caused the death of his father, is proof positive that all was not right with him. There are several explanations, though none seems conclusive. Some authorities say that he had become lovestruck by another maiden, called Aigle, others that he had decided it would be unwise to return to Athens married to the daughter of their ancient enemy Minos.

  At any rate, while his ship laboured north upon Sunion, and while sad Ariadne slept, another ship from another direction approached Naxos with an unknown god aboard – the youthful Dionysus. This ship was a pirate craft whose crew, blissfully unaware that their captive was a god – far less that he was the wine-god of antiquity – were hoping to sell him off in a slave-market hereabouts. They did not stand a chance for, when the young Dionysus got wind of their intentions, he – here comes the famous picture which has captured everyone’s youthful imagination – caused a vine to sprout out of the hull and clamber up the mast to immobilize the sails. Ivy snaked out and looped itself in the rigging. The oars began to writhe and turned into huge serpents. As if this was not enough for the poor pirates, he then transformed himself into a lion and roared so loudly that everyone jumped overboard in terror. Laughing, Dionysus resumed his human form, summoned a fair wind, and had himself wafted towards this strange green gem of an island which rose out of the waters to meet him. Henceforward, this was to become more or less the adoptive headquarters of the wine-trade, a trade half-material and half-mystical, half-orgiastic and half-sacramental.

  As for Dionysus, one must presume that this young sprig, who found the sleeping Ariadne and married her, was a fairly late reincarnation of a much more ancient god – as old as the vine itself – whose magic origins stretch way back into prehistory.

  Be that as it may, the green abundance of Naxos is even today a fitting place for such an apotheosis, and, though the Naxian wine does not match up to that of many of its neighbours, it is still drinkable, while the island has a fine, polished presence which still bespeaks richness and plenty in fruit, flowers and nuts. Approaching it across the water, you feel you understand how Ariadne could have been so happy here. She bore the young god many a child, and he, in his ‘tree-god’ incarnation – one among his many passports – saw to it that the whole of nature burst into bloom to share their happiness. Moreover, he hung a necklace of stars in the sky for his bride which we still know as the Corona Borealis.

  A glance at the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology will indicate the bewildering tangle of attributes which make up the portrait of this most important god. They are so many and so various that the subject becomes daunting. One thing that is clear is that he was not made for a quiet home life. The almost unimaginable antiquity of the vine itself may be partly responsible for the complexity of his nature; it seems to have a pedigree as long as that of Homo sapiens himself. Scholars speak of fossilized leaves and seeds found in Miocene and Tertiary deposits; it has been traced in early lake-dwellings in the Swiss Alps, as well as in the mummy-cases of dead Egyptians. Details of wine-trading figure in hieroglyphics in the fourth century BC, and by the time of Homer and also of Noah wine was an article of common consumption. Much later, the precise Pliny describes ninety-one varieties of grape and fifty different wines known to the Romans.

  In early times there seems to have been some indecision about how to treat it – for the vine is a climber and will simply crawl about on the ground if left to itself. Nor will it bear properly, unless pruned. Here and there, in Naxos, you will see it trained up a fig tree, and be reminded of references in the Bible to this custom. Its need to be pruned must have been one of the great discoveries of antiquity. My own theory, for what it is worth, is that the rite of circumcision is a ritual based on vine-culture and on the ancient observation that, to bear fully, vines must be pruned. Circumcision was an act of sympathetic magic to enable men also to ‘bear’ well – presumably males?

  In early times, the island of Naxos was known as Dionysia because of the density of its green orchards and vineyards. But the modern town bears few traces of a classical past, except that the many finds of the later archaeologists suggest the medieval town was situated plumb on the Mycenean site. The little white town you see today is an appendix to Rhodes, though the scale is miniature, and its Venetian heritage has not been retouched and jazzed up as it has in Rhodes. There was indeed a long Venetian occupation, and the knights once held a large commanderie in the island as well as an arsenal, in about the fifteenth century. As you enter harbour, your eye will catch s
ight of the little islet sometimes called Bacchus in demotic Greek, where a scrabble of ruins attests the existence of an ancient temple, supposedly dedicated to Apollo though often called the Temple of Dionysus. There is not much else older than the knights, but the little white town rises elegantly and harmoniously on to the crown of the hill, where the citadel stands (once more on the obvious site of an ancient acropolis). Once more, too, there is a warren of narrow, dazzling streets and chapels washed whiter than white by successive coats of limewash. The cathedral is not memorable, but the town has all the tumbledown atmosphere which comes from Venetian palazzi allowed to go to rack and ruin – and this may have occasioned the passion that Byron seems to have nourished for Naxos. In his earlier days, Byron flirted with the idea of buying Ithaca; but when he saw Naxos, he turned traitor and expressed the wish to return one day to settle there. It is a bolder, more resolutely Aegean version of Corfu – which would, by the way, have been perfect for Byron: but the British were there, and that gave him the cold shudders, whence Naxos …

  As may be imagined, the Christian Church had a good deal of trouble with Dionysus, and was finally obliged to do what Governments do to troublesome opponents – ennoble them. As St Dionysios, he was pressed into service on the side of law and order, and he exists to this day very thinly disguised as this medieval equivalent of a king. The modern, approved version of his arrival in Naxos is worth quoting, for it shows that while his name has been changed by an iota, his character has not been changed by a jot. The modern peasant story goes like this: