The Golden Step

by Christopher Somerville

  I am looking for the church of Agios Ioannis Theologos, St John the Evangelist, a place with reputedly good 14th-century frescoes which has eluded me on a couple of occasions in the past. Now I find it tucked down below a bank in the olive groves a mile outside Kalogeros. The frescoes are black with age, but a strikingly serene Christ Pantokrator occupies the bema, the rounded sanctuary beyond the iconostasis. Scaffolding poles, planks and bags of concrete, piled against the church wall, hint at a restoration at some future date – perhaps very far in the future. It is one of the scandals of Crete that so many of the island’s 800-odd frescoed churches are left to the ministrations of snails and damp. Yet over-restored church frescoes (there’s more than a hint of that about the Panagia Kera in Kritsa) can lose something precious under the revisionism of the rehab brush – the tidemarks of history in cuts and slashes struck into the paintings by religious bigots, the graffiti of naughty village boys, and in the very tracks of the original painter’s brush the sense of connection across six or seven centuries with that medieval artist’s own particular person.

  Across the valley in Meronas I walk into the church of the Panagia, All-Holy Mary, to find the restorers actually at work. Perched on planks, paintbrushes in hand, they are picking out details of the paintings in the nave roof. These frescoes are stunning, especially a Crucifixion with a horribly agonised Christ, a calm Good Thief already sporting a halo, and a grotesque buffoon of an unrepentant thief with a bulbous Cyrano nose, clearly – if the face is the mirror of the soul – already on his way to the nastiest corner of Hell. Propped up carefully against the scaffolding I find the 14th-century icon of a sorrowful Virgin. The Panagia guards the church, and must not be removed; so the villagers have warned the restorers. The Virgin’s long, long face and nose, her little pouting red mouth, are illuminated by a pair of deep, mournful eyes. These have been scored across several times by a knife-point – ‘Turk’ is the one-word explanation of the restorers. But the Virgin continues to gaze reproachfully out from her glassed-in captivity, commanding the gaze of the onlooker even through her scars.

  On the road to Gerakari I pass over a bridge above a spring deep in a dell. A stone washing slab lies beside the spring, and I fantasise about scrambling down there and taking off my sweaty shirt just for the pleasure of washing it in that cold, clear water and pounding it on that cool stone slab under the fig trees. To point up the painful gulf between fantasy and reality, E4 signs begin to show their black and yellow faces at the roadside. Casting doubt and caution to the wind, I decide to follow them and the map to Gerakari. Big mistake. Between them they lead me a long way up a thorny hillside, and abandon me just where the thorns are thickest. Bastards. Back to the road with scratches on arms, legs and face.

  The houses of Gerakari, square and plain in modern concrete, offer mute witness to the terrors of war in which a village can literally be blown to smithereens and wiped from the map. Gerakari possesses a still more direct and emotive testimony to its tragedy of 1944 – a war memorial composed of a giant marble sculpture of a woman in classical dress, in the act of chiselling the names of the murdered villagers into the face of a monolithic square column. As General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller served Anogia in the aftermath of the partisan capture of the German Commander of Crete, General Kreipe, so he dealt with the villages under the Kedros range of the western Amari which were deemed to have offered help to the andartes on the run with their valuable prisoner. The village war memorials record the progress of the burnings and executions through the valley from 22 to 30 August 1944. That first day, 22 August, the German soldiers hit six villages between Gerakari and Ano Meros. The memorial in Kardaki lists nineteen names from four neighbouring villages. The big marble monument on the edge of Vrises honours thirty people, including five surnamed Korounakis and four of both the Thountedakis and Troullinos families. As for Gerakari, forty-two were killed, including nine of the Kokkonas family and six of the Koutelidakis. Altogether the Occupation forces destroyed nine villages and shot 164 people. This was just in the one week-long operation in Amari.

  From a cave high on Psiloritis, George Psychoundakis watched the unfolding nightmare, as he recorded in The Cretan Runner:

  ‘I stayed there two or three days before leaving, watching the Kedros villages burning ceaselessly on the other side of the deep valley. Every now and then we could hear the sound of explosions. The Germans went there in the small hours on the twenty-second of August and the burning went on for an entire week … First they emptied every single house, transporting all the loot to Retimo, then they set fire to them, and finally, to complete the ruin, they piled dynamite into every remaining corner, and blew them sky high. The village schools met the same fate, also the churches and the wells, and at Ano Meros they even blew up the cemetery. They shot all the men they could find … They launched this cruel campaign to terrorise the entire island, and to show us all that the Germans in Crete still had the power to destroy and overthrow, as barbarously as ever, all that still remained standing.’

  Back in Thronos in the cool of the evening I find that Patricia’s son Doug has turned up for a few days’ lotus-eating. He’s a tough young guy, pleasant-mannered, with a close-cut beard and dark sapphire-blue eyes. Doug’s the head warden of a polar bear reserve at Churchill, way up in the Arctic Circle on the western side of Hudson Bay, and a few days in the warmth and greenery, the vivid colours of Amari represent to him an unbelievable treat.

  In the warm still night, under the stars of Amari, we receive his talk of snow and ice, of polar bears and Inuit laughing contests and frozen hunting expeditions, as we might the yarns of a Baffin Bay harpooner or a foretop-man returned from the Great Southern Ocean. There’s some sighing and head-shaking around the table. Doug is treated with deep respect, his talk with just a shade of dignified reserve. Local pride is ever so slightly on its mettle, perhaps. Thronos is full of wonders, too, even though there are no polar bears.

  Now my time in Lotus Land begins to trickle out fast. The weekend comes round again, bringing Lambros with it. He has great plans for an expedition to Psiloritis. In the end it is Doug and I who set forth with him on Saturday morning, the feast of Agios Ioannis Theologos. First port of call is the village church – not the ancient, frescoed church of the Panagia, but the more modern church dedicated to St John the Evangelist. It is a pleasure to hear Andonis – last seen playing lyra in the Dionysian atmosphere of the May Day picnic – in his alter ego as cantor, intoning responses and passages from scripture in a deep, dramatic voice. Two priests officiate – Papa Dimitris, the long-term incumbent of Thronos who looks with his cloud-like beard exactly like a saint from a fresco, and a visiting priest from Amari. Every now and then one or the other pops out of one of the two doorways in the iconostasis for a few seconds of chanting before retiring into the bema again, a double act irresistibly reminiscent of those wooden weather dolls of the 1950s, one with a brolly and mackintosh, the other in sunglasses and short sleeves, who would foretell the weather in the twin doorways of their snug little house on the mantelpiece of every maiden aunt worth her salt.

  The Amari priest delivers a rousing sermon carefully tailored to his rural flock – God is present in our vineyards, our fields, our olive groves; He enters our houses invisibly, like television, whether we will it or not. When it comes to Communion, he holds the platter of bread just out of my reach, and gently enquires, ‘Katholico?’ ‘Ne,’ I reply, remembering at the last moment that Greek ‘yes’ is English ‘no’. ‘Kalo, kalo,’ he says softly, ‘good, good.’

  Though the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches have been divided for a thousand years, there’s an understanding between them. The Orthodox faith as practised in Crete seems to have a humanity and a directness of personal contact that mainland Greeks have sometimes felt to be lacking in their church. Maybe it’s the fact that recent reform in that mainland church has placed a high premium on further education among its priests, while Crete has generally maintained a more low-key approach;
maybe it has to do with the vigour of many Cretan priests, their willingness to dance and play music, and the very active role that Greek Orthodox priests in the island played in the front line of resistance against both Turks and Germans. Whatever the reasons, in an age of falling church attendance, especially among young people, observance of the faith still stands pretty central to up-country Cretan village life.

  Priests, above all, are expected to be approachable. When on another occasion I went across the valley with Lambros to the saint’s day feast in his native village of Petrohori, there was a general murmur of recognition and of pleasure as two priests got up and danced together – a murmur that affirmed the pivotal position, in the past and the present at all events, of the priest in the life of the countryside.

  Priests dancing at Petrohori

  In the covered place by the church

  two priests dance. The plump one with the

  smile trails a grey hem.

  His brother-in-Christ, pigtailed, pale and precise,

  has neatly tucked up his black skirts.

  Petrohori feasts. I raise my glass to kiss the

  snowy cheeks of great Psiloritis, guardian mountain,

  as Lambros unchained has kissed mine.

  Smack clay dust from your shoe soles, you

  young Petrohori farmers. Tense whining of

  lyra, foxy glances of the players

  judge your moment faultlessly,

  the skyward flight of feet and spirit

  beyond what your fathers aspire to, or your shuffling

  grandfathers, sappy old men crooking

  arthritic knees, swinging polished boots in the dance.

  Linking old ones and young step the well-matched

  brothers, soberly, black shoes held to the dust.

  Some day, following tradition, wolves may

  again menace the flock. Then priestly soles

  will rouse the clay once more round Petrohori.

  Outside the church after the service, Manolis the kafenion owner dispenses shots of raki. We break off chunks of artos, sweet spicy bread, from a loaf whose shiny crust has been indented with the sign of the cross. Manolis beckons us into his lair for more of the same. It’s two o’clock by the time we are bouncing and groaning in Lambros’s rattletrap pickup along the dirt road from Vistagi and up across the lower slopes of Psiloritis. The afternoon is very windy, with rags of cloud streaming through the valley. We stop frequently on the way up, to talk to shepherds we meet en route and to give the pickup a respite from its climbing duties. It has no hand-brake, but a stone wedged under each bald tyre does the job well enough. We pull up at a little chapel with a bell hanging in the tree outside to pay our respects at the railed tomb of Myron Litinas. ‘Shot and burned by the Germans, 3.9.1943, aged 77,’ reads the inscription. Behind in the rock lies the cheese cave of the Litinas family. In the front part of the cave a hearth has been built, complete with a circular hollow of stones to support the cauldron of boiling milk. The cool cleft behind has been fitted with rows of wooden shelves for storing the cheeses that the Litinas men will make this summer. Plastic bottles of oil and wine stand wedged into cracks along with boxes of matches, cooking utensils and a tinfoil screw of salt. ‘They will be here making cheese tomorrow,’ offers Lambros, ‘or maybe the next day, or the next.’

  Back at the pickup Lambros revs the engine while Doug and I kick the chock-stones from under the hopeless old tyres. Then it’s on and up to the mitato at the end of the road under the saddle of Psiloritis. Here are stone benches and a stone table, plenty of shade from the sun under prinos and asfendos trees, and a deep fire pit in which Doug does the guy thing with dried prinos branches and matches till a wobbly blue heat spiral begins to ascend and blow away on the mountain wind. Lambros produces a blue bowl full of pork chunks marinated in his special relish and spears them on sharp spits of prinos. And I fetch salt, artichokes, bread, cutlery, wine, oranges, broad beans and olives out of the flatbed of the pickup.

  We eat, slowly and deliberately, for at least a couple of hours, chatting desultorily, enjoying the wind and sun and the mind-bending view. The wind turns cold, gusting strongly enough to upend our glasses and scatter bread crusts and artichoke leaves across the ground. Clouds thicken in the west, but only to 5,000 feet; above this the jagged white teeth of the snow-covered White Mountains rise against a cobalt sky, as do the horns of Psiloritis at our backs. Below the cloud belt the Amari Valley lies in a thick opaque light, ridges and bluffs looming mistily far below as if underwater.

  Shepherd

  Forehead polished egg-brown by sun, fingers

  stiffened to thick roots: he dumped himself

  in ancient jeans down by our fire, then hauled

  hard on each knee – crack! – to bend his legs.

  Thick dusty spectacles shaded eyes bleared

  by seventy years’ looking for sheep in sunlight

  merciless on white slopes of Psiloritis.

  He cocked his head up like a dog, sniffing

  the talk, assessing, weighing us well.

  A high old voice, rapid, parched, loosened

  by raki downed in a gulp, like stones in a dry

  streambed set chattering by spring rain; and loud

  from lack of use through lone days, lonely nights.

  Moustached like a sage, bristled like astivitha,

  so he sat, head back, peering through wrinkles,

  shooting out words, cracking his knees, and watched

  his flocks, his dogs, and us, missing nothing.

  An old shepherd turns up and sits with us, sluicing Lambros’s raki down his throat. It seems many days since he has heard a human voice. Behind dusty spectacles his eyes, taking us in glance by glance, are faded blue. He speaks in a cracked voice, his words tumbling over each other in his eagerness to be heard. You could take him for a distracted, even a disassociated man. But I have a feeling he doesn’t miss much.

  Towards nightfall a couple of teenage lads arrive in a pickup to do the milking. The shepherd clambers away up the mountainside and drives the sheep down in a bleating, bell-clonking flock. The boys chivvy and beat them into the pen behind the mitato. Then they take up station, one each side of the exit gap. From either gatepost hangs a loop of rope padded with a sausage of cloth like a horse’s collar. Into these milking straps the boys stoop until the padding lies across their chests. Then they let themselves swing forward, suspended in the padded straps from the anchoring pillars. The simplicity and ingenuity of the arrangement makes itself clear as the milking begins. As the sheep, driven from the rear by the old shepherd, made for the exit, the front runners find themselves grabbed two by two by the lads and deftly hauled round until their udders are neatly positioned over a pair of big milk buckets on the ground. Swinging forward in their straps, the boys empty each udder in a dozen squirts and release the owner to go prancing and leaping to freedom. We time them at it – 15 seconds per sheep, and about 400 in the flock. Milking the whole bunch is under an hour’s work for the two boys. God knows how long it would take, and how much backache, if the lads had to bend and straighten continually to catch, subdue, position and milk each one of those 400 sheep.

  While milking continues we wander off across the slopes of Psiloritis. Lambros pulls us up on the brink of a fearful slot in the limestone that opens grey lips ten feet wide. ‘Sink hole,’ he says, ‘throw in a stone, Christopher.’ We hear it bounce once, twice and three times, then no more. Glancing in, I see a black rock funnel chuting away into darkness. A gleam of old snow lies at the bottom. A hundred feet down? Two hundred? I begin to realise that Iannis Pantatosakis had meant what he said about the dangers of sink holes in the White Mountains, covered in a treacherous crust of thin snow through which the lightest walker might plunge. Once at the bottom of a funnel like that, you could shout all year long and never be heard.

  Back at the mitato we are invited within. A roaring fire of thorns burns on the hearth. The cheese-hut is a single plain room w
ith light bulbs drooping from a wire that crosses the low ceiling. There’s a bed by the fire, a table, a store cupboard. The bare necessities. Here Iannis the shepherd has to stay all summer, from the arrival of the sheep after snowmelt to their departure for the valley before next snowfall. Why? asks Lambros. The shepherd gives a one-word reply. Lambros translates: ‘Sheep stealers.’

  At last it’s time to go. We stumble out onto the mountain in a windy, cloudy night. Jolting down the dirt road with its endless hairpin bends, the pickup develops a squeak that Lambros has never heard before – ‘new music,’ he calls it – to go with the symphony of rattles, clunks, splutters, shudders and ominous grinding noises that are its normal accompaniment. Second gear fails halfway down the mountain. Then the headlights falter and go out. It is ten o’clock at night when we eructate to a stop outside the Taverna Aravanes where Maria and Patricia have been chewing their nails on the doorstep since sundown, convinced we have gone over some precipice and are lying in pieces at the bottom, never to be found again.

  My last day of Amari idling. Patricia, Doug and I take a box of fancy biscuits and pay a call on Nikephoros, the healer of Thronos, and his wife Aretousa. Nikephoros in his mid-seventies cuts a splendid figure, in looks rather like one of those heraldic Chinese dragons, with a halo of white hair and a splendid white beard swept back from a face seamed with wrinkles and tanned by all weathers. A pair of extremely sharp eyes looks out between a snub nose and bushy dark eyebrows. His hands are those of an artist, delicate and expressive, the fingers tapering to a leaf-shaped point.