Roumeli (10 page)

Next day we headed south through the Thesprotian mountains that tower from the Epirote coast between Igoumenitza and Parga, a secluded region full of stony villages with broken minarets
and ruined mosques where Albanian beys and agas used to live in lordly halls among plane trees; many of the villagers talk the Cham dialect of Albanian. It is an almost inaccessible world, enclosing sudden grassy plateaux with wild irises and anemones and meadows of narcissi and conical hills and secret lakes with swamps and reeds and flocks of waterbirds. Beyond the steely eastern barrier, the mountains shoot down to the Acherousian plain, where, under the shadow of the great mountain stronghold of Souli, the Acheron and Cocytus meet, two rivers of Hades. Many Vlachs and Karagounis pasture their flocks in this hermetic region. Below a collection of dismal and moulting wigwams on a bleak slope we fell in with some Sarakatsáns from the northern Zagora with a large flock of black goats. Here and there among the flocks near the huts and the folds stood mysterious tapering piles of boulders about eight or ten feet high, over the top of each of which was draped a hooded nomad's cloak. They looked odd and sinister. We asked one of the shepherds what they were for.

“To frighten the wolves away,” he said.

“Do you get many of them here?”

“Ah,” he said sadly. “That's the sort of place it is.
Tétios éinai o tópos
....”

It looked it, too.

Now, a bit reluctantly, I must call a halt to these flashbacks and postscripts—high time, perhaps—and retreat several years, a few hundred miles in space and a score of pages, to the main thread of this narrative, from which we began to deviate among the tassels and the buttoned upholstery of the carriage rocking back with us through the Thracian darkness between Sikarayia and Alexandroupolis.

Not many minutes had passed before the guard worked his
perilous way along the duckboard outside and climbed in; not to punch our tickets, but for a chat. We were his only passengers. He was a dark, jovial, round-faced refugee from Smyrna.

“Well,” he said cheerfully, offering cigarettes, “did you find out where they hide their pots of gold? Any for me? I could do with it, at this job.”

We told him about the wedding. As I had already absorbed one or two hazy notions about the possibility of the ancient descent of the Sarakatsáns, I asked him what he thought about it.

“I don't know,” he said amiably, “and, what's more, I don't care. I hate the ancient Greeks. We had to learn all about them at school: Plato, Socrates, Pericles, Leonidas, Aristotle, Euripides, Homer—
Andra mi ennepe, Mousa, polytropon os malla polla
and all that stuff. No, I don't
hate
them: that's too strong. But what have they got to do with me? Perhaps we descend from them, perhaps we don't, what does it matter? And who did they descend from, pray? Nobody knows. They were Greeks and so are we, that's all we know. I come from Smyrna—there's an ancient Greek city for you—and I may be more Greek than the Greeks in Athens, more Greek than your Sarakatsáns, for all I know. Who cares?
Greece is an idea
, that's the thing! That's what keeps us together—that, and the language and the country and the Church—not that I like priests particularly, but we owe them a lot. And those old Greeks, our celebrated ancestors, are a nuisance and I'll tell you why. They haunt us. We can never be as great as they were, nobody can. They make us feel guilty. We can't do anything, people think, because of a few old books and temples and lumps of marble. And clever foreigners who know all about the ancients come here expecting to be surrounded by Apollos and gentlemen in helmets and laurel leaves, and what do they see? Me: a small dark fat man with a moustache and eyes like boot buttons!” He laughed good-naturedly. “To hell with them! Give me the men of the War of Independence, who chucked out the Turks, give
me Averoff, who presented us with a battleship out of his own pocket, give me Venizelos, who saved us all and turned Greece into a proper country. What's wrong with
them
? If we weren't such fools and always quarrelling among ourselves, if we could have no wars or revolutions for fifty years—fifty years, that's all I ask—you'd see what a country we'd become!
Then
we could start worrying about the Trojan Horse and working out our relationship to Pericles and finding out whether the Sarakatsáns descend from the ancient Greeks!”

I saw his point. For some, the ancients are a source of inspiration and vague pride; the outside world sets so high a price on them; to others they are a perpetual irritation. What about Byzantium? that's where our traditions date from, a modern Greek may think; not from Pericles holding forth on the Acropolis, not from Diogenes's barrel or the tent of Achilles.

What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?

 

[1]
Decades or centuries ago the only notable thing here was a hermit living under a tree. Both have vanished but the old Turkish name, Dedeagatch, which commemorates the hermit-tree, is still sometimes heard. Its new name celebrates Tsar Alexander II, the victor over the Turks in the Balkans, not King Philip's great son.

[2]
This addition is frequent, especially in monasteries. I have never succeeded in discovering why.

[3]
I write with feeling of the complications involved in the office of
koumbaros
, for I performed it a short time ago at the marriage of Antony, the son of an old Cretan brother-in-arms, Grigori Chnarakis of Thrapsano. This bond, both a compliment and a responsibility, is held more binding than kinship.

[4]
It is, in fact, the birthplace of Kolettis, the War of Independence hero, one of the early Prime Ministers of Greece, and at one time the Greek Minister in Paris, mentioned in the Goncourt diaries; also of the poets Krystallis and Zalacosta. It is a large Vlach village on the Acheloös—Aspropótamo, or “white river” in demotic. The inhabitants are known as
tzintzari
, which resembles the Rumanian word for mosquitoes. In winter their huts are scattered inland from Preveza by the hundred.

[5]
Both these derivations of the word Sarakatsán are wrong. More of this later, and also, later still, about the Koutzovlachs.

[6]
To embroil matters further, the word “Karagouni” is also used for the inhabitants of several Greek villages near Karditza on the Thessalian plain, and, loosely and chaffingly, as a derogatory nickname for any Thessalian.

[7]
Another ritual conjuration that is often inserted at a break in the line is
Amán!
, the Turkish for “mercy!” Though its role is often that of a stopgap, I think it is basically a railing at fate, an unspecific act of compassion, as it were, for intolerable sorrows and disasters in the past; half “willow willow waly,” half “
aï de mi
.” At the end of each fifteen-syllable line of the rhyming couplets which are the most common metre for these mountain epics—spun out and embroidered, however, into many more than fifteen when they are being sung—several
amáns
, strung together as a single word, boom in a deep bass from the whole company:
amánamánamánamááán!
There was no dearth of this today.

[8]
I must apologize here for a bad mistake in
Mani
. I stated there that sixteen-syllable verses (as opposed to the almost universal fifteen) only exist in Maniot dirges. It is not true: there are several other very small pockets of this verse form dotted about and this very song, I see from my notes, is one of them. I wish I knew where it came from.

[9]
The rich conflict of derivations for the word Sarakatsán is developed in Appendix I.

[10]
All Greek nomads wear hooded goats' hair capes in winter.

[11]
Aegina, Poros and Euboea.

[12]
Deriving from the Latin
lac, lactis
, as opposed to the ancient and modern Greek word
gala, galaktos
.

[13]
Not all, by any means.

[14]
W.H. Auden:
Nones
.

[15]
Unfortunately they are only in Greek. Infinitely worse, just as these pages go to press, death has halted these labours.

[16]
I have visited a number of nomad camps in the last month or two in the Epirus area, and many of the customs described in
I Sarakatsáni
are still in full force; some have recently died out, some are only recalled by old men and toothless crones; a few have vanished from living memory. As this is not a scientific work, I will not elaborate these distinctions. To avoid a barnacle growth of caveats and provisos, I will put all in the present tense. But much of it, especially the religious part, should be dated half a century ago.

[17]
See Chap. 10,
Mani
, by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

[18]
See Chap. 13,
Mani
.

[19]
I have just read, in a Hakluyt Society account of a sixteenth-century Portuguese embassy to the Prester John, that
Qerbān
is the Ethiopian or Amharic word for the Host in the Monophysite Mass. Both must have been stolen from the Turkish word for the Moslem sacrifice of a lamb at the kourbān-Bairam, commemorating the sacrifice of Abraham and the ransom of Ishmael by the slaughter of a lamb.

[20]
Badly wounded nomads are wrapped in the skins of newly killed rams. This suggests an analogy with the Aesculapian formula at the Amphiareion in Attica, and at Epidaurus, of making invalids incubate in ram-skins as a preliminary to their cure.

[21]
Children are often born in the autumn and spring migrations. Alerted by the start of travail, the mother drops behind the caravan with a companion and the baby is born. Then they hurry to catch up.

[22]
I tried to do so this year, in a
stani
near Nea Philippiada, not far from Preveza. There was lots of merrymaking and some mild transvestitism, but no more.

[23]
In Crete he is hanged and burned. In Hydra he used to be stood up before a firing squad and shot down amid execration.

[24]
It is all the more remarkable, then, that Karaïskakis should have been such a one. Not only did he grow up and prosper, but he became
protopallíkaro
—a second in command of guerrillas—to the great Sarakatsán hero Katsandóni, and, when he died, inherited his band in the Agrapha. In the War of Independence, he was one of the great glories of Greece. This example might have softened their harsh prejudices.

[25]
The spirit of death.

[26]
Borrowed, indeed, from my kind host at Modi, in the Chalkidike peninsula, Mr. Peter Stathatos. It carried me over half Macedonia and much of Thrace, covering more than five hundred miles by the time we got back to his stable a month later.

[27]
Alternatively Strymon.

[28]
Author of
Honour, Family and Patronage
(O.U.P., 1964). A study of institutions and moral values in the Sarakatsán community.

[29]
It took some time to get the meaning of the word he used for “woman.” It is
gynaika
in ordinary demotic; Andoni pronounced it
y'niák
.

T
HE GREEK
summer dies slowly. October was melting into November, but only the earlier dusk, the sudden mists, the chill mountain air and the conflagration of the beech trees had hinted, as we advanced from Macedonia down the eastern flank of the Pindus, that autumn and winter were on their way. Here, where the Peneios falls into the Thessalian plain and saunters off down its broad and pebbly bed, not a leaf had fallen from the plane trees. Behind us climbed the Pindus, the road branching steeply westwards over the Metsovo pass to Yanina and Epirus. But to the east the Thessalian champaign expanded from the mountain's foot as smoothly as an inland sea, its distant shores of Olympus and Ossa and Pelion invisible in the early autumn haze.

In the flurry of impending arrival in Kalabaka and the screeches in Vlach as the truckload of migrants assembled their babies and poultry and their bundles, the Meteora went almost unnoticed. Only when we were nearly in the streets of Kalabaka did we gaze up at the tremendous spikes and cylinders of rock that soared for perpendicular hundreds of feet into the sky. There was nothing to halt the upward path of the eye, except, here and there, an irrelevant tuft of vegetation curling from the rock-face on a single stalk; or the straight damp smear of some spring's overflow, shining like a snail's track from the eagle-haunted regions to the outskirts of the grovelling village. One immense drum of stone ascended immediately overhead.
Behind, separated by leaf-filled valleys, the pillars and stalagmites retreated in demented confusion, rising, curling and leaning, tapering to precarious isolated pedestals (on the summit of one of which the wall and the belfry of a monastery, minute and foreshortened, could just be discerned) or swelling and gathering like silent troops of mammoth halted in meditation on the tundra's edge.

We gazed upwards in silence for a long time. Even the Koutzovlachs, blunted to this phenomenon by their migrations to and from their summer villages in the Pindus and their Thessalian winter-pastures, seemed lost in wonder. They only sank their glance at the cry of some fellow-villager making the month-long journey by road with the village flocks. For the streets were a moving tide of sheep, and the air was full of golden dust and baas and shouted greetings in the strange Latin dialect of these black-clad shepherds. Through the assembly of homespun cloaks and whiskers and crooks and the fleecy turmoil, a tall monk advanced. He was a head and shoulders taller than anyone else, and his high cylindrical hat increased his height to the stature of a giant. “There you are,” the driver said. “There's Father Christopher, the Abbot of St. Barlaam.”

Could we stay at his monastery for the night? Of course we could, or two or three. His assent was underlined by a friendly blow on the shoulder and smile on that long saturnine face that radiated the wiry strands of his beard in a bristling fan. Half an hour later we were advancing westwards on either side of his mare. A satchel of provisions hung from one side of the saddle bow, a wicker-caged demijohn of wine from the other. In the middle, loose and easy in the saddle, puffing at his short pipe, talking, or quietly humming to himself, rode the hospitable abbot. The greetings of passing peasants, as we ambled westwards, prompted a response of humorous and squire-ish banter or an occasional mock-threatening flourish or a jovial prod with his great stick. The shadows in the astonishing rocks were
broadening, and all, in the second village of Kastraki, was mellow and golden. Then the last houses fell behind, and as we rounded the vast central tympanum of conglomerate, a deep gorge opened before us, that dwindled and climbed along a chasm between the mountains. The white walls of the monastery of the Transfiguration appeared on a ledge far overhead and soon, the outline of St. Barlaam. My heart sank at the height and the distance. It seemed impossible that we should ever reach that eagle's nest....At that moment, the sun dipped below the serrated edge of the Pindus. The mountains ahead turned grey-blue and cold and threatening and sad, and every trace of cheer seemed to die from the world. Those Greco- and Mantegna-like rocks might have been the background for the desert macerations of St. Jerome, the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, or the Wilderness of the Temptation.