Roumeli (5 page)

Her two dances over, the bride withdrew to her upper chamber and general dancing began. It was uncomplicated, formal and correct. Plenty of the younger Sarakatsáns were well on in wine; they had been so for days; but their dash and high spirits deserted them the moment they joined the long chain of the dancers. Their pace subsided to a ritual shuffle. There is nothing unusual in this; with a few exceptions, Greek dances, however many people may be joined hand in hand, are, in effect, solos; everything devolves on the leader, and each dancer, when his turn comes, fulfils the temporary role of coryphaeus. The job of the others, and especially of his immediate neighbour to whom he is linked by a handkerchief, is to support him in his convolutions. These are astonishing when a real mountain dasher is in the lead. But today, even after the first bridal
saraband, the dionysiac zest seemed to abandon the others the moment they linked hands. The dominance of form in the life of these nomads began to dawn on us.

Outside this semi-circle, however, all was rejoicing. Staidness evaporated on release and scores of young nomads were carousing under the branches in uninhibited and growing festivity. Squatting or standing among the wigwams, rings of geometrical women confabulated or sang together and there was even an exclusive little ellipse of dancing women. Some of the younger of these squaws had wooden cradles slung papoose-like on their backs, each containing a miniature swaddled nomad. Their songs had the same epic themes, laced with lament, as those of the men. The murmur of their talk was broken, again and again, with peals of laughter.

The Sarakatsánissas, usually so silent in the presence of men, look forward to weddings as their only chances of fun. The talk, as though preordained, takes on a bawdy turn of hair-raising frankness. None of the exciting, comic or absurd aspects of sex are left unexploited. Rhymes, anecdotes and reminiscences are eagerly repeated and capped, crone mumbles toothlessly to crone, wives gesturing like anglers make boastful and teasing claims about their married life, girls listen agog. Fits of laughter punctuate this scandalous chat, hands are flung in the air in hilarity, faces are covered in mock shame. All this goes on beyond male earshot, while, at a distance, their husbands and fathers and descendants smile indulgently at the seasonable ribaldry.

Nightfall had transformed the scene indoors. Late arrivals and one or two indefatigable ones were still at meat; the rest, lit now by scattered oil-dips, had lapsed into a semi-trance of wine and song. Our return with Uncle Petro evoked hospitable cries of greeting and invitation, repeated many times and driven home by the clashing of wine-tumblers, to stay the night, as it was so late; or for a week, a month or a year or forever, to forget London and take to the huts. Alas, some tiresome fixture in
Alexandroupolis next morning compelled us to leave; so, after manifold farewells, we climbed the stairs to pay our respects to the bride in her hushed upper chamber.

The rushlight on a stool cast so dim a light that the group at the end was hard to discern. One of the seated bridesmaids, mown down by her vigil, was fast asleep where she sat; a nudge from her neighbour shook her blinking into line. None of the other tiring-women had moved and the bride had remained frozen for the hours since we had last seen her in the same posture of submission. The faint radiance robbed them all of a dimension. Darkly haloed by their interlocking shadows, they melted into the wall and their black and white figures assumed the aspect of a fresco, half-lit; here and there an earring, a coin, a bracelet, a ring or a necklace gleamed for a moment and dimmed again with the rise and fall of the wick like fragments of gilt or isolated gold tesserae in a mosaic. The bride silently bowed in answer to our farewells, the only one to move in this still and hagiographic troop of virgins and martyrs. We tiptoed out.

“Doesn't she ever speak?” I asked Uncle Petro when we were out of doors.

“Not now,” he said.

“It's rather sad, during her own wedding.”

“Ah! That's the way it is....That's as it should be.”

By the firelight, the scene out of doors assumed a Breugelish look. Dancers were still sedately moving in silhouette, a last spitted lamb was turning over a bed of glowing charcoal and groups of nomads reeled arm in arm and filled the night with loud voices and laughter. Overcome by wine or exhaustion, a few slept under the branches in disjointed attitudes as though snipers had laid them low in mid-career. A heroic, unsteady figure, egged on by his companions, was draining, with head and trunk flung back, the last dregs from an immense wicker-cradled demijohn. Empty, it fell with a thud and rolled away amid cheers. A flaxen-haired boy, bent double against a tree-trunk,
vomited the day's intake in a sombre gush. Chewing and snarling sheepdogs wrangled over bones. The huts, now softly lit from within by the glimmer of oil-dips and hearths, had become vague dark globes looming out of the night, and deeper still in the shadows we divined the presence of tethered horses. The singing grew fainter as we reached the railway line.

“You should have seen the weddings when I was a boy,” Barba Petro was saying, as the serpent of lighted train windows grew larger down the valley. “We used to set out on horseback a hundred strong to carry off the bride, firing off our guns as fast as we could load them.
Dang! Dang! Boom! Boom! Dang!
...Horses used to be lamed, people wounded, sometimes people actually got killed. Whereas now...”

The train had clanked to a standstill in the little halt. We were aloft once more among the anachronistic fringes and tassels of our Victorian carriage.

“Come to see us up in the mountains, up in the Rhodope!,” he shouted as the train began to move. “The plains are no good.” He pointed with his crook into the night. “In the Rhodope—”

The wheels drowned the rest. The light from the carriages flashed across his dwindling figure at faster intervals, and the glimmering huts and the fires and the tiny moving silhouettes behind him looked as strange now, and as alien to Europe, as a nomadic encampment in the steppes of Central Asia.

Who are these extraordinary people, and where do they come from? As in the case of the Greeks themselves, no one knows. All is problematical, starting with their name.
[9]
The first faint mention of them, in the pages of Eugenius the Aetolian, occurs
in 1650, and everything before or since is folklore and surmise. Every symptom and every particle of evidence is circumstantial.

Western travellers, when confronted by nomads and hut-dwellers, have almost invariably set them down as “Wallachians,” or “Vlachs”; rightly, quite often. There are many thousands of these semi-nomadic Aroman people, migrating twice yearly between their villages and the plains, speaking a Latin language of their own which is closely akin to Rumanian, and as different from Greek as the Welsh language is from English. Theories about their origins abound, all of them hotly debated. To an uninitiated eye and ear, there are points of surface resemblance between the Vlachs and the Sarakatsáns. Both are nomads, hut-and-tent-dwellers, and shepherds; and the garb of the men, but not of the women, has something in common. The confusion among foreign travellers was probably furthered by the word “vlachos,” written with a small “v.” This word designates not only the Latin-dialect speaking Aromans, the “Koutzovlachs” proper, but it is loosely applied to shepherds generically all over Greece. In fact Greeks, if they want to make it clear that they are speaking of Vlachs, not merely of herdsmen in general, nearly always use the word “Koutzovlachs” (or “limping Vlachs”)—another promising subject of linguistic speculation—or, in the case of those whose Latin language is more mixed with Albanian than (as among the Koutzovlachs) with Greek, “Arvanitóvlachi,” or, more colloquially still, “Karagounides,” or “Black-Cloak Men.”
[10]
The Vlachs are much more numerous than the Sarakatsáns but less widespread; they played a prominent if minor part in Byzantine and Balkan history; they inhabit remarkable villages in the mountains and form the bulk of the population of several Macedonian and Thessalian towns; all this, with their difference of language and, some say, of race, from the rest of the Greeks, has been a fascinating anthill for
linguists and ethnographers. For the last hundred and fifty years, unfortunately, they have been a theme of bitter political discord in the Balkans. These considerations, with the muddle over the word “vlach,” and the fact that the habitats of the Vlachs and the Sarakatsáns largely overlap, has edged the more reticent and fleeting Sarakatsáns ever deeper into a cloudy and unchronicled hinterland. Till almost yesterday they lived in a forgotten historical dell to which the paths were few and overgrown and finally, not there at all. It is only in recent decades that lone scholars have begun to ply their billhooks. The confusion between the two groups has never existed among the Greeks themselves; it is a foreign reserve. Indeed, under scrutiny, their dissimilarity pierces any surface resemblance more and more sharply. Everything—manners, customs, clothes, folklore, beliefs, appearance, feeling and, above all, language—thrusts them further apart.

Semi-nomadism exists all over Greece; shepherds leave their mountain villages in winter in search of lowland pastures free of snow; lowlanders do the reverse in summer. Among the true semi-nomads, the Vlachs, however, where village economy depends entirely on livestock, autumn brings about an exodus to the plains of the whole male population with all their flocks. They leave a skeleton population of women, children and old men behind to keep the home fires burning till their return to the mountains in spring. In winter, they live in huts in the plain, or, more and more, nowadays, in villages which have sprung up on the sites of their invariable winter sojourn. Alone among the pastoral people of Greece the Sarakatsáns have no fixed abode. They are, unlike the Vlachs, with the substantial villages and towns they have inhabited for centuries, entire nomads.

Apart from their wandering, they regard their summer pastures as their true home. The details of their life are formalized and codified; custom, ritual, tradition and taboo beset them thickly. Nothing is improvised or haphazard. No trace of the
slovenliness which makes gypsy life, after unknown ages, seem half-learnt. Each detail in choice of ground and orientation and hut-building and hearth-laying, almost every sentence uttered and every gesture made, is hallowed by usage; it is the accumulation of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years; hereditary, patriarchal, established, immutable, conservative, and self-sufficient, everything emerges from a vast expanse of time as smooth with long handling as the shuttle of a loom, the blurred carving on a distaff or the patina on the shaft of a crook.

Ancient literature ignores them and there is not much in modern times. Linguistic evidence proves a wandering life since the fourteenth or fifteenth century; the probabilities point to a much earlier period. All are agreed on the north and north-western tincture of their speech. No surprise here: these are the regions where they are most plentiful. But it is surprising that the Sarakatsáns who, save for the southern Peloponnese and, with three exceptions,
[11]
the archipelago, are scattered all over mainland Greece, should all speak identically. Similarly, centuries of winter migration deep into Slav and Albanian and Turkish lands have left no trace on the hoary Greekness of their idiom. Costumes in Greece, especially those of the women (and, most notably those of the Vlach women), change, even more frequently than accents, from village to village; yet the garb of the Sarakatsánissas, with the barest minimum of variation, is the same all over Greece. So are their customs, down to the last detail. Everything, especially their feeling of solidarity and of aloofness from everyone else, underlines their common origin. It is very noticeable in their attitude to the Vlachs: “If you hear a shepherd use the word
lapte
”—the Vlach and Rumanian word for “milk”
[12]
—“hit him over the head.”

Ordinary Greek villagers approve of their Greekness, envy their freedom, admire the primeval sternness of their regimen, and despise their primitive ways—“they never wash,” they say “from the day they are born till the day of their death.” Their aloofness promotes distrust. Plainsmen speculate about their buried and suppositious wealth. They regard them as sly opponents and the two are often at loggerheads when nomad flocks encroach on their grazing grounds. They were always looked on with suspicion by the authorities. Wild habitat, mobility and evanescence placed them beyond the range of the Ottoman tax-collector and sheltered the boys from the press-gangs and the girls from the harems. Their eyries were a sanctuary for robbers and guerrillas and they engaged in both pursuits. Two of the greatest Klephts were almost certainly Sarakatsáns from the Agrapha mountains: Katsandónis and Karaïskakis. When the nomads came under the Greek law, their reputation for poaching pastures and for acts of banditry and ambushes for ransom, stuck. (For long decades, as in the old days, they were out of the range of taxation and military service.) Watchful and independent—unlike the Albanovlachs, who would flatter the pashas and graze their flocks—they had a fierce feeling for freedom. “We and the monasteries were the backbone of all the revolutions against the Turks,” they say, perhaps a shade boastfully; there were others. Shepherds and monks were vital to resistance in Crete and elsewhere during the German occupation. They alone knew all the passes, springs, woods, caves, short-cuts and look-out points.
Klephtouriá
was theirs.

They, in their turn, thought the plainspeople tame and slavish hinds, but hinds with an unfair advantage; they know how to read and write.
[13]
The villages and plains are a threat to freedom: if nomads pass through a village, they do it at dead of night, and pitch camp far away. Boojums to a man, they have
perfected the art of snark-like vanishing at the approach of trouble.
Adespotoi
, “masterless,” is their key epithet.