The Golden Step

by Christopher Somerville

  Nowadays it is Stelios ‘Steve’ Manousakas who makes things hum in Argyroupolis. Stelios is an archetype of a very particular kind of modern Cretan – a self-made man who lived away for years in Canada, making money in the restaurant business, and has come back to Argyroupolis with his French-Canadian wife Joanne and a nice wad of money to inject some pep and some prosperity into his home town. An ex-mayor of the place, a proprietor of tourist shops, restaurants and tavernas all over town, he can fix anything for anybody. Needless to say he, too, is a friend of Charis Kakoulakis. ‘In Argyroupolis, Christopher, you will see Mr Manousakas and say that you are my friend. You will have no problems in Argyroupolis.’

  Indeed the only problem I encountered in the bustling little town was finding a time when Stelios Manousakas could make himself available for a chat. ‘Ten minutes, please, at my shop, OK?’ In the event, of course, we sat in the archway outside his tourist shop for three hours, absorbed completely in our talk, while business went on all round us. The returned exile and successful entrepreneur could detail just what was needed for his little town – and by extension, for every town in Crete. Drive, imagination, an ability to see the bigger picture, a willingness to grasp those small opportunities for investment – classy little tourist shops selling soaps and perfumes made locally, decent rent rooms done out the traditional way but with proper mod cons, computers for the use of youngsters with a good idea. ‘But many of us don’t want to see that, or can’t see that. It’s kind of a problem all over the island; how do you get the brightest and the best to stay around and put their eggs into the Crete pot, rather than the Athens pot or the London pot? Or the Canada pot, come to that? And then they have to follow up the bright idea, make it really work. A lot of Crete isn’t quite ready for that yet.’

  The talk, as so often in Crete, turned to war – not the current NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Stelios didn’t want to open that subject, but the Second World War and how the Greeks felt about the British. Hitherto I’d heard nothing but expressions of brotherhood and mutual goodwill whenever the topic of the British and the war in Crete had been raised. Didn’t you help us drive out the Germans? Weren’t there many brave Englishmen fighting alongside our andartes? We are friends, you know! Good health to the British, and let’s have another! Perhaps unwisely, I made reference to the old shepherd of the Nida plain and his pleasure at discovering, as he thought, that my father had been with the Cretan resistance. Stelios clearly had other ideas, and took pains to redraw the emotional map for me.

  ‘The English are not necessarily regarded as heroes because of the war, you know. The Germans certainly did bad things – for example, they destroyed Kallikratis, where you are going tomorrow. But it must be said that their message when they came was: Leave us alone, and we’ll leave you alone. Many men joined the resistance, left their house and family, went to the mountains. Many suffered, many died.’ Stelios spread his hands, palm up. ‘Then when the world war finished and the Greek civil war began, what happened? The English supported the Greek government, the King, all the forces of reaction. The Greeks saw some people who had collaborated with the Germans given positions of power, given influence and opportunities. ELAS, that was our pro-Communist party, it was defeated, and many good patriotic wartime andartes were killed or discredited. And the people saw the British supporting this. They remembered how at Yalta, Churchill had carved up the world with Stalin and Roosevelt, and Britain had taken Greece as part of its sphere of influence. Lots of Greeks didn’t like that, and they didn’t like the English very much.’

  ‘But what about Crete?’ I said. ‘I’ve never heard a word of this anywhere I’ve been in the island.’

  Stelios shrugged and stirred his coffee. ‘Here in Crete it was different. It always is! We didn’t want to fight each other – we had only isolated incidents, somebody shot here or there. There wasn’t the same bitter struggle. So maybe feelings against the British were not so strong, and maybe that’s still true today. All I am saying is – if you really want to know Crete and the Cretans, you must be realistic and hear all sides. Don’t expect to be treated with special friendliness when you come to Greece, just because you are British and we fought on the same side in the war.’ He looked up under his brows. ‘This is real history I’m telling you, not some romantic bullshit. That’s the way we felt, as Greeks.’

  That evening, on kafenion TV in the town square, a reiteration by NATO of its five demands of Serbia – to stop the killing in Kosovo, to withdraw its forces, to accept a NATO-based international security force, to allow refugees to return, and to work towards a permanent political solution. The spokesman’s harsh, intransigent, uncompromising American voice crackled out: ‘Mr Milosevic has only one exit strategy – to say to our five demands: yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.’

  Leaving Argyroupolis shortly after dawn the following morning, a little sobered and subdued, I passed a number of deflated but still sheep-shaped hides, complete with fleece, skin, hanging blue sinews and blood streaks, laid limply over the roadside fences to dry. The road west ran through the shady Grigaris gorge towards Asi Gonia, home village of George Psychoundakis, the ‘Cretan Runner’. Psychoundakis’s entire flock of sheep was stolen from him after the war, and he endured many vicissitudes, at one low point working as a navvy building the gorge road to raise the means of living for his family. It was during his work breaks, and during quiet periods at night in caves and shelters along this road, that his masterly account of his years in the resistance, The Cretan Runner, took shape. I looked around me, picturing the slight figure crouched scribbling by the flicker of an oil dip, as I walked on into the borders of Sfakia, that harshest, highest, least compromising and most macho of all the regions of Crete.

  If the lowland country of eastern Crete is a ripe fig tree sheltering in a sunny garden, and the central upland a steadfast olive tree nurturing a rich harvest of fruit against the wind and weather, Sfakia in the south-west of the island is a grim and knotty old prinos in a dry crack of the mountains, tough, durable and prickly, carrying the threat of a sharp spike for any intruder. The aspect of Sfakia is rugged and hard, a bare south-facing coast cut with fearsome gorges that rises steeply out of the ink-blue Libyan Sea and climbs for 8,000 feet to a roof of pale, parched mountains. Nothing is easy. Fishing on the rocky coast is unpredictable, shepherding in the remote mountains fraught with hardship and danger. People have to grab what they can, when they can.

  The story the Sfakiots tell about themselves neatly encapsulates their personal mythology. When God made the world, He dealt especially kindly with the people of Crete, for whom He had always a soft spot. Olives were His gift to the folk of Sitia and Selinos, the east and west ends of the island. To dwellers in the low northlands of Crete He offered grapes and wine, to those in Amari the succulent figs and cherries. And lo! He looked on His work and saw that it was good. ‘Hey, Lord!’ complain the Sfakiots, arriving before His throne all riled up and armed to the teeth as usual. ‘What do we get, apart from these dry rocks You’ve dumped in our corner?’ God smiles a half smile and beckons the Sfakiots close. ‘Listen,’ He says, ‘don’t you see, you fools? You just sit here among your rocks while the good people of Sitia and Selinos cultivate their olives, the northlanders their grapes and the men of Amari their fruit trees. Sit tight and silence your empty bellies until every other place in Crete has got its harvest in. Then,’ says God, ‘you Sfakiots can run down there and pinch the lot!’

  Talking in the taverna on the beach at Kato Zakros, the night before I set off on my walk through Crete, I’d mentioned my intention of passing through Sfakia towards the end of the expedition. The taverna owner, a native of east Crete, had produced a wordless comment I’d sometimes seen before when Sfakia was under discussion: a bending and flexing of the right arm to mime formidable strength, accompanied by a screwing of the left forefinger into the side of the head to imply craziness. Mainstream Crete looks on Sfakia with a mixture of admiration, disapproval and a patronising kind of amuseme
nt. Sfakia returns the compliment, with interest. To Sfakiots, traditionally, the rest of Crete seems a pallid, limp-wristed kind of place. Sfakia is the only country for a proper man, and these men do their best to live up to the image. You’ll see more beards, more black shirts and baggy breeches, more leather knee-boots and twisted sariki headbands in Sfakia than in all the rest of modern Crete put together. Historically Sfakia with its rugged mountains and remote fastnesses was the main centre of resistance to invaders. There is still strong local pride in stories of Sfakiot rebel leaders, from possibly mythical ones like Kandanoleon and his ghastly death by hanging at the cruel hands of the Venetians after being captured at a drunken wedding celebration, to Daskalogiannis and his ghastly death by flaying at the cruel hands of the Turks after he had upset the Pasha of Iraklion. Spend any time around the village of Koustogerako in the mountains above Sougia, and someone will tell you of how when the Germans had the women and children of the village lined up for execution in September 1943, Kosti Paterakis fired a miraculous shot from his hiding place nearly a quarter of a mile away which killed the machine-gunner and put the Germans to flight. Kosti’s brother, eagle-nosed Manoli, one of the most famed and feared resistance fighters and a valued colleague of George Psychoundakis and Patrick Leigh Fermor, died in his hale and hearty old age long after the war, tumbling from a peak as he chased an aegagros. Even though Koustogerako lies over the border in the neighbouring province of Selinos, this was the ultimate exit for a Sfakiot hero. On kafenion walls and in private houses throughout Sfakia the likenesses of these palikares still hang in amateur etchings, flyblown daguerreotypes and fading black-and-white photographs. Their fierce spirit still pervades the region. The inter-family feuds that used to plague much of upland Crete have virtually disappeared from the island, but some still smoulder in the Sfakian mountains, usually sparked off by sheep-stealing or land encroachment. From time to time someone gets hurt, or is ‘persuaded’ to leave their village along with their family; every now and then someone is shot. Sfakia is not a place for milksops.

  In Asi Gonia the old men sitting on their narrow kafenion chairs under the plane trees looked tremendously impressive with their sweeping moustaches and curly katsounas. The tarmac ended a few hundred yards beyond the village, and the dirt road commenced a steep seven-mile climb into the hills to the west. I climbed with it, sweating buckets, stopping every hour to get the pack off and take a slug of water. At every hairpin bend on the steep, shadeless road I tipped my hat to a new angle to keep the sun off my already stinging face. Unseasonably hot weather for May, the locals had said. I hoped it had melted the snow on the high desert of Lefka Ori as well as roasting me. The steep grey mountains I could see rising in front looked daunting enough, but I well knew they were really only foothills. Up at the pass, staring ahead, a familiar trick of perspective kicked in; the rugged grey mountains shrank as if sucked downwards into the lower country, while the pointed heads of the central mountains of Lefka Ori rose behind and above them, streaked and whorled with snow, like hooded bullies peering over the shoulders of the juniors to watch a playground scrap. They did look very snowy still. Tomorrow night, with luck, I would be sleeping near Askifou, the start of E4’s climb into the central desert of the White Mountains. A phone call then to Pantelis would settle whether the high crossing would be feasible or not.

  The mountain village of Kallikratis, one of the remotest in these hills, lay among its trees in a hidden valley. A summer village, inhabited from May till November by shepherds and the tenders of olive groves and vineyards, its tiny population of 30-odd had just arrived for their six-month tenure. Everyone relied for transport on rattletrap pickups and a selection of donkeys and mules. Walking the dirt road through the village I saw large numbers of abandoned houses, tottering Turkish archways opening on to mildewed, roofless rooms, sun-cracked doors hanging drunkenly open. Under tangles of fig branches, heaps of stones from half-collapsed walls lay where they had fallen. What could have brought such ruin to the place?

  Black-shirted and handsomely moustached Stelios Giannakakis, vigorous in his late middle age, received me at his kafenion with real hospitality. Pantatosakis? Of course I know the man! A true palikare – he has trodden every stone in Crete. Any friend of Pantatosakis is a friend of mine, end of story. You are hungry? Tsikoudia first – that’s what we call raki in these parts. Yia-sou, Christophere! Yia mas, Stelios! Now: salad, bread, misithra, some chips, some wine. That’s the best I can do for now, I’m sorry. Where are you staying tonight? Sleeping out in that little bag? Not at all! You’ll sleep to spiti, at my house. Nonsense, not another word!

  In the long, lazy afternoon I turned to the Psalmist on the kafenion verandah. He was inconsolable: in utter, abject misery. ‘My days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as a hearth … By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin. I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the housetops … For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping.’

  Stelios’s sons and friends sat tight in the shade inside the kafenion, watching TV. The rumble of explosions and wail of ambulance sirens came faintly out to the veranda where Christos, the older brother of Stelios, sat beside me and drank coffee. I laid my little customised phrase-book on the table and cranked up a halting conversation, amplified with plenty of hand signals and facial contortions. Why were there so many ruined houses in Kallikratis? Was it just the result of depopulation, of the hardships of the shepherding life? No, said Christos – it was the Germans, back in 1944.

  ‘I was about 8 or 9 years old then. Up in the hills around were the andartes, fighting the Germans however they could. There was one Englishman who stayed up there that we called “O Tom” (Tom Dunbabin, the senior British officer liaising with the resistance groups in Crete). He was very fierce with the Germans. I used to go up where he was hiding and bring him milk. The RAF planes would come over at night and drop everything the andartes needed – clothes, food, equipment, arms, radios.

  ‘The andartes pulled off a big coup in the spring of 1944 when they captured the chief German, General Kreipe, and took him over the mountains to Rhodakino and then away to Egypt. It was a great triumph for them, but it brought trouble here later on. The Germans came to Kallikratis, thousands of them, in October, and they blew up and burned all the village. They shot some people, too, including women – about twenty men and about ten women, I think. I was only a boy, but I remember taking Stelios – he was 3 years old – and going up into the mountains to be safe. These houses that were blown up … some have never been rebuilt, as you see. For us they have become a sort of memorial, I suppose.’

  The TV explosions abruptly ceased as the set was switched off. A couple of old men came stumping onto the veranda, angrily expostulating to each other. I thought they were having an argument with each other, but then the words ‘Kosovo’ and ‘bombas’ emerged from the tirade. One of them caught sight of the fair-haired stranger. Yermanika? Amerika? Oh, English! Listen, I fought alongside the English during the war, but this is too much! Do you know what we have just seen in there? It’s intolerable! NATO are fascists, no better than that. Where will it end? What do the Americans think they are doing? What – are the Balkans their colony? Come on, what do you have to say to me, eh?

  What would have happened if I had been able to muster a cogent defence in decent Greek? Such was his fury, the grandfather would probably have struck me with his stick. My lack of a tongue saved me. Oh, terrible! War is bad – very bad! No war! My poor platitudes didn’t please the old man, but neither did they bring his anger to the point of explosion. He glared at me with contempt. Humph! Is that all you can say? Huh! You’re a disgrace to the Englishmen I knew. Pathetic! And with that he turned on his heel and marched off.

  Later I learned the cause of his rage. A NATO airstrike had hit a civilian convoy in the early hours of that morning at Korisa, a village near Prizren in Kosovo, killing
nearly ninety Albanian Kosovars. The film of the aftermath, originally broadcast on Serbian TV and replayed all over Greece, was the most graphic and disgusting yet shown. It struck me forcibly, and with shame, how quickly one could isolate oneself in these wild mountains from events in the wider world. Only last night I had sat in Argyroupolis and shivered to hear the stony American voice of the NATO spokesman dictating what Mr Milosevic’s response to the organisation’s demands must be: yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. Today I had not even thought of Kosovo. Absorbed in Christos Giannakakis’s account of the war of sixty years ago, I had taken the TV explosions and sirens for the soundtrack of a Hollywood film.

  I woke in the middle of the night in desperate need of a pee. I was hunched up under a blanket on a carved bench twenty feet long that ran the length of the Giannakakis house, a single large room spanned by a great Turkish arch of stone. Striped rugs covered the concrete floor. A wooden ladder stood propped against the sill of the elevated, open-ended compartment where Stelios slept. Other cubbyholes and cubicles had been formed with clapboard partitions, and in these lay half a dozen family members or maybe more. Before dropping off to sleep on my bench I had registered them vaguely as politely smiling shapes flitting past to their alcoves in various stages of night attire.