On the Shores of the Mediterranean (18 page)

In what was the fast gathering dusk, having crossed the Strait, we stood at the foot of the great crumbling theatre, one of the once splendid buildings with which Octavian had adorned the city of Nikopolis, which he built more or less on the site of the encampment from which he and his army had watched Agrippa’s great victory. Bats flitted through the arcades of the auditorium and from the marshes on the shores of an inlet in the Gulf of Arta which are said to be infested with snakes and reptiles, some of them venomous, and undoubtedly are infested with billions of mosquitoes, malarial or otherwise, came the reassuring din created by thousands, if not millions, of frogs.

Then we followed a track past the remains of the stadium for about 500 yards, to see the place where Octavian pitched his tent before the action, on which a monument was raised, dedicated to Neptune; all that remained of this monument was a large plinth with holes cut in the side of it which were used to display the prows of ships captured in the action. To populate Nikopolis, Octavian (now Augustus) arbitrarily moved to it the populations of Aetolia and Akarnania, more humble places in the neighbouring parts of western Greece, in much the same way that so many of the inhabitants of post-war Britain were hi-jacked from their homely environments and settled in what was ostensibly better accommodation to satisfy the whim of some local authority. Whether or not the
hoi polloi
enjoyed living on the shores of what was later to become a malarial marsh, the city flourished. St Paul wrote the Epistle to Titus here in the winter of AD 64, and later a school of philosophy was founded here by Epictetus. It was also said to have been the birthplace of the thirteenth Pope, St Eleutherus, who was elected in AD 177 at a time when the language
of the Church of Rome was still Greek. Plundered by the Visigoths, rebuilt by Justinian, it endured until it was finally destroyed by the Bulgarians in the eleventh century. So disappeared one more of the cities of the ancient world.

From Préveza we drove north again, crossing the Acheron (the River of Grief), one of the rivers of Hades, the unseen Lord of the Lower World, the Acheron here flowing through a wide plain on the last part of its journey from its source in Mount Tomaros, a mountain south-west of Ioannina, to the Ionian Sea.

It was such a new road that whoever had just finished coating it with liquid tar half an hour previously had been so anxious to get home to their tellies that they had forgotten to put up any warning notices. As a result we ran through this lake of hot bitumen at about 50 mph and emerged from it with a van that was not spotted with tar but was completely black, as was the white Mercedes (and the white caravan it was towing) of a wretched German who was travelling in the opposite direction.

Nearly weeping with vexation we drove at top speed to a hamlet on the coast called Limenískos Fanári, known to the ancients as the ‘sweet harbour’. It was a pretty place at the mouth of the Acheron, now called the Mavropotamos, with two or three cafés down by the water’s edge and fishing boats tied up alongside among the reeds that lined the estuary; but for the moment, with the tar hardening on what was virtually a new vehicle, we had no eyes for it. Hoping that we might enlist some help, we stopped opposite one of the cafés, which had four men sitting outside it at a table playing cards, and began to try and clean the van, using petrol from a spare can and cotton wool from a first-aid set. When that ran out we tore up one of my shirts which I had always rather liked.

It took one and a half hours to get most but not all of it off (it was even on the roof), and another twenty minutes to get it
off ourselves and our clothes; and it would have taken even longer if a small, kindly, fat schoolboy had not appeared and offered to help. During this entire period the men at the table playing cards did not cast a single glance in our direction.

Then, having rewarded the little boy, who seemed sorry that it was all over, we drove to a down-at-heel-looking café further along the estuary which had a camp site, and there, fed up and exhausted, had a somewhat limited but profitable conversation with a very dark young man, while what proved to be his father sat in a corner drinking ouzo and saying nothing.

‘How much is the camp site a night?’

‘Hundred drachma. Not so much, isn’t it?’

‘How much is the retsina?’

‘One bottle, twenty-nine drachmas. Not so much, isn’t it?’

‘That’s too much. No one pays twenty-nine.’

‘OK. Too much. How much you want to pay?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘OK. Twenty-five drachmas. Not so much, isn’t it?’

Then his mother, who was even darker than he was and surprisingly resembled a beautiful Hindu, cooked us a delicious dinner of pork chops with rosemary. It is said that some of the inhabitants of this piece of coast of what is now Greece but was once Albania are the descendants of Negro slaves brought here when it was part of the Turkish empire.

All night I had terrible dreams about being in a German bomber that was crashing over Southampton but never actually hit the ground, just kept on going down.

We woke in the morning to find that chance had brought us to one of the more beautiful shores of the Mediterranean.

Beyond the fence that hemmed the camp site in, which was so full of holes that it could not keep anything either in or out, there was a beach of fine sand on which the sea fell ceaselessly, not with
the long sighing sound that the Atlantic makes even on the calmest days, but – with a north wind blowing – a restless, pattering sound. The beach curved between two headlands, the nearest one, above the mouth of the river, covered with holly trees and small holm oaks and with a chapel with a red-tiled roof, built of whitewashed stone near the headland, which was more like a big white barn than a chapel. It had a cross on top of it that was used as a leading mark by the fishermen. The other, more distant headland was covered with scrub.

Into this bay, close under the headland with the chapel on it, the Acheron/Mavropotamos, the antithesis of a river of Hades, a sand bar partially blocking its mouth, flowed slow and deep into the lonian Sea.

Here, on this point, where the river entered the sea, stood the café where we had eaten the previous night, a deplorable construction built partly of tin sheeting, partly with whitewashed breeze-blocks which were embellished with crude drawings of fish, crayfish and a mermaid, and roofed with lethal asbestos. Built only a year previously, it could easily have been forty years old, for it was already both aged and ageless, somehow contriving, by one of those miracles which can only be performed on the shores of the Mediterranean, to look, if not beautiful, right. It stood in a grove of eucalyptus trees which were growing in what, until they were planted there and had become established, were sand dunes, and there one could sit outside it under a shelter of reeds listening to music of a strange, distinctly non-European sort that the son had put on tape.

The lavatory arrangements were almost indescribable. Here, as in so many non-Muslim places on the shores of the Mediterranean (Muslims use water for this purpose), you did not put the used paper down the hole but in a cardboard box, in order not to block up the primitive drainage arrangements. Some day perhaps, when
the season was finally deemed to have ended, or when we went away, for we were the last guests, it would be emptied. The only wash basin in the entire camp site, which in the height of the season accommodated more than 150 campers, had no waste pipe. On the site, water was pumped to the showers which worked and to the lavoratories which didn’t. The refuse bins, which had never been emptied of the ordure left by the last intake of campers, were scarcely visible beneath mounds of overflow.

At the far end of the beach, at the foot of the scrub-covered point, another, smaller, river, in which the cattle grazing in the plain congregated in the heat of the day, entered the bay.

Behind the waterfront, where the men had played cards, a completely new town had arisen and was still arising, for some of the houses were nothing more than empty brick and concrete frames. The fisherman who owned our café, whatever he may have been previously, was now distinctly indolent. He did not need to be anything else as he also owned one of the cafés on the waterfront as well as the whole waterfront here, so one day, if he laid off the ouzo a bit, he might wake up to find himself a millionaire, for it is inconceivable that such a beautiful place could be left more or less unscathed much longer.

We spent three days here, soaking up the sun, trying but failing to summon up the energy to visit a ruin called the Necromanteion of Ephyra, the Oracle of the Dead and of Hades, which was somewhere hidden in the Plain of Fanári. In the heat of the afternoon, covered in fly repellent, we slept in the shade of the eucalyptus trees. The outer world from which we had come, stepping out of it, as though through a looking glass, receded. We lived on fish, pork chops, eggs, peppers, tomatoes, cooked in various ways by the enigmatic Hindu. We only ate food that had been cooked. With the lavatories and the dustbins in mind, this was not the sort of place to indulge a passion for anything in its
raw, native state, such as green salads. In the evening we used to cross the river at the bar, up to our necks in water, and walk out into the marshy plain which stretches away westwards to the sea, a strange and beautiful place, like the Indian plain on the banks of the Ganges, full of clumps of tall pampas grass that looked as though tigers might be lurking in them, reeds, wild sage and trees with fern-like fronds, an abode of cows and their herdsmen, and shepherds with their sheep, rather than tigers.

Once we climbed up among the dwarf holly and the ilex to the white chapel, which once a year became a place of pilgrimage, to find it shut; then continued on up to the top of the headland, to where it fell away in a sheer cliff as if someone had cut it with a knife, and there looked down into green shimmering depths in which one imagined the Nereids might live.
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On the way back we met a shepherd with his sheep, moving them along the bank, who spoke English. We had just at that moment seen a snake in the marsh and we asked him what sort it was, and if it was dangerous. He was an old man and had, he said, spent many years working as a janitor in Pittsburgh, although it was difficult to imagine it.

‘There are snakes,’ he said, looking at it where it was wriggling aimlessly – we could see now that it was not really a snake at all, but some sort of slow worm, ‘that are blind. It used to be said that they see only once a year, on the Saturday before Easter Sunday, and that God had made them blind because they might harm people. This is such a snake.’

At seven o’clock each evening the fishermen went out, taking their boats over the bar to shoot their nets which they would haul in at dawn, and for a while all was excitement and activity. Around
seven-thirty clouds of swifts, having swooped continuously over the river, settled in the trees, making an astonishing noise like hundreds of miniature alarm clocks going off. Upstream now the river was greengage green, downstream, towards the sunset and the bar, it was the colour of the lees of wine, the same colour as the sky and the sea beyond. By eight-thirty it was quite dark.

We left early the following morning to go to Suli. The fisherman gave us one of his bottles of ouzo. We both knew we would never go back. It would be better not to. One can rarely duplicate moments of happiness. The summer was ended.

The way to Suli used to be up through the gorges of the Acheron River where it emerges into the Plain of Fanári, at a small place called Glyki. We travelled to it by a road so densely crowded with tortoises, all on the march across it apparently bound for some pre-determined destination, that we felt obliged to get down and remove them from it, many of them having already been squashed by passing vehicles whose drivers could easily have avoided doing so if they had wished. Glyki was a rather ruinous place with a pleasant café on the tree-shaded bank of the Acheron near the mouth of the gorge. It looked a suitable subject for one of Edward Lear’s sketches or paintings, and in fact he may have sketched or painted it while visiting Suli in the course of a journey in the
spring and summer of 1849 which took him from Préveza to Parga, eastwards through the mountains of Epirus to Ioannina, over the Pindus range to the monasteries of the Meteora in Thessaly and through the Vale of Tempe.

When we visited Suli its isolation was about to be destroyed by a motor road, full of hairpin bends, amazingly wide in places and with an appalling surface because it was still unfinished, which had been bulldozed through a wild, mountain region, covered with dense growths of oak, ilex and pines for a distance of some ten miles and one in which there were scarcely any habitations apart from herdsmen’s bothies and the rude habitations built by charcoal burners.

On the way to it we passed a large encampment of these charcoal burners who, they told us, would remain here in the mountains until the weather broke, which they said would be quite soon.

It was a scene of extraordinary activity. Long lines of mules laden with timber were being brought down from the heights above by savage-looking muleteers and their handsome but equally wild-looking womenfolk. The quantity of wood collected in this way was enormous and huge piles of it lay about in what appeared to be the utmost confusion. To burn the charcoal they set up the timber on end in conical piles up to twelve feet high and anything up to twenty feet in diameter at the base. They then covered them with earth and charcoal dust, leaving a vertical chimney in the middle, open to the air. These piles were now smoking away through their chimneys, rather like wigwams with fires burning inside them.

The carbonization began at the top and worked downwards, and from the outside towards the centre. The highly skilled work of controlling the combustion was carried out by men whose clothes and skin were almost jet black. Their job was to open and
close various holes around the base of the pile and half-way up the sides, which controlled the combustion, a process that could take anything up to three weeks and would produce a quantity of charcoal equivalent to about a quarter of the weight and about 60 per cent of the bulk of the original timber. The heat generated by these slowly combusting piles of wood combined with that of the hot sun overhead was appalling.

Wild-looking though these charcoal burners and muleteers might be, they were kindly, hospitable people, both men and women, taking us to their camp fire, plying us with delicious, sweet, slightly smoky tea which had some unidentifiable herb in it, and happily posing for group photographs. How long these people would continue to earn their living in these particular mountains once the road was completed was uncertain. ‘The wood,’ as one of them (who spoke Italian and acted as interpreter) said, ‘will still have to be cut and will still have to be lashed to the pack-saddles and brought down to the road. But now there is a road it seems likely that the timber will be loaded on to lorries and taken to some modern plant where the charcoal will be made, using kilns and retorts fitted with condensers which is a less wasteful method. If this happens not only shall we charcoal burners lose our jobs but there will no longer be any need, as there has been up to now, for mules to carry the charcoal down to the plain in sacks as there was previously when there was nothing but a mule track.’ He spoke with a complete absence of rancour, almost with resignation, as – in the course of this long journey in the Mediterranean lands – I had noticed simple people often do when they find their way of life threatened, in this case one which their forebears, he said, had practised since time immemorial.

Suli, the one-time capital of the Suliots, now consisted of a few houses scattered about a sort of pass or plateau, with a chapel standing on a height above it. On the far side of this plateau,
where there were a number of older houses on the mountainside, the road descended steeply before climbing again to the foot of the great Turkish fortress perched on the Trypa, the Hill of the Thunderbolts, from which sheer precipices fell away to the gorges of the Acheron, 1200 feet below.

We left the vehicle and climbed up to what was a second pass at the foot of the fortress rock under a hot sun. It was an enchanting place, with a couple of wells, a shrine of the sort common at passes anywhere in southern Europe, shaded by two big plane trees that the Turks may have planted there 180 years previously when they took Suli, beneath which a youthful shepherd of about twelve years of age was reclining, surrounded by goats and sheep. Just below it, in the full heat of the sun, an old man and his wife were building what looked as if it was going to be some sort of ticket office, using breeze-blocks. When it was finished they would then sit in it, issuing tickets to the tourists who would be disgorged from the coaches that had ground up to this astonishing place.

Having asked the miniature shepherd to call off his fearfully savage dogs, which had come bounding down the mountainside in order to tear us to pieces, I left Wanda, who had decided to help the ancient couple in the construction of their ticket office and was now busy handling breeze-blocks, and set off up a steep path, the way being marked by black rags which someone had stuck on the bushes which covered the hillside. The walls of the castle were still standing, all except those on the face where the main gate was, where they had collapsed. Above them, in what had been the principal courtyard of the Albanian-Turkish governor, another fine plane tree rose, looking rather like an immense green umbrella. High overhead a pair of eagles hung almost motionless on the air currents. The only sounds in the ruinous courts were those made by cicadas and the droning of
bees and other insects. An adder was asleep in the sun, curled up on a stone.

This, and the lower town, were the sites of the former mountain capital of the Suliots: wild, independent warriors, Greek-speaking Albanians, Christians who, like the Pargiots, the inhabitants of Parga, had never been converted to Islam by the Turks and had never been conquered by them, even centuries after Murad II had taken Ioannina, the principal city of Epirus, in 1430.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Suliots began to be a nuisance to the Turks in the person of Ali Pasha, the cruel, ruthless and disobedient representative of the Sultan in Epirus. They harassed his protégés, the Muslim farmers in the coastal plain, and carried on an interminable sort of predatory warfare with their immediate neighbours, this being the principal justification for existence of all Epirots and Albanians, whether Christian or Muslim.

It proved extremely difficult to put down the Suliots. From the end of the 1780s until the first years of the new century, Ali Pasha, rendered doubly barbarous by being thwarted, made innumerable attempts to capture Suli, all except one (when some 500 Albanian Muslims were led into a part of their territory by two treacherous Suliots, Pilios Gousis and Karanikas, using secret paths known only to the Suliots) being unsuccessful, and even this only yielded him a relatively small part of their territory. The Suliots, men and women alike, contested literally every inch of the way. Even the final attempt to take Suli after a siege led by Ali’s son, Veliz, at the head of 18,000 men, proved unsuccessful. Veliz was forced to raise the siege and grant the Suliots a safe conduct out of their fortress on the Trypa, where they had suffered the agonies of thirst and famine, which would allow them to retreat to Parga, Zalonga, Vourgareli and other places of their choice with their honour unblemished.

As soon as they quitted the safety of their fortress, however, Veliz, like all the members of his family a master of perfidy, attacked them, and the end of the Suliots was a terrible one. Some were massacred, some blew themselves to smithereens with gunpowder, taking their opponents to eternity with them, some, including unmarried girls and married women, hurled themselves from the precipices, the latter with their offspring clutched in their arms, all of them to avoid the dishonour of being taken, the men to avoid the horrible tortures that certainly awaited them, the women to avoid slavery. At the Rock of Zalonga, sixty Suliot women dashed their children on to the rocks below, then hand in hand danced to the edge of the precipice, one by one throwing themselves down at each recurring round of the dance until none remained. Those who succeeded in reaching the coast at Parga fled, as did the Pargiots, to Corfu and other of the Ionian Islands. Later, many of these survivors, some of whom took service in Corfu under the French and Russians, fought against the Turks in Greece in the War of Independence, though not particularly distinguishing themselves at the siege of Missolonghi, where their intolerable demands for money may have accelerated the demise of Byron. Eventually they mutinied, and had to be sent away.

Now, only a few ancient houses, and perhaps these were of Turkish origin, and the castle called the Kiáfa, or Suli-Kastro, and that was Turkish, built by Ali Pasha on the site of their own fortress to obliterate their memory (in which Lear had spent a thoroughly uncomfortable night as the unwanted guest of the Muslim governor), remained of what had been sixty-six Suliot villages. It was as if the Suliots had never been.

Back on the road from Igoumenitsa, on the way to Ioannina, what used to be a twenty-hour ride on horseback, we visited a small monastery. It was half hidden from the road in a little dell. The
open space in front of it was an arcadian place, shaded by planes, with a little spring of clear water bubbling down into a stone basin, and very quiet except for the humming of the monks’ bees, busily at work on behalf of their masters. What must have been at least a couple of coach parties had just left, having picnicked under the trees, leaving behind them 346 empty German beer cans, an even larger number of paper cups, quantities of unconsumed food already thick with bluebottles, and masses of soiled and sticky plastic. A lot of this muck had been thrown into the spring. The place was a disaster area.

Feeling rather self-conscious, as one does when casting oneself in a do-gooder role, we began to clear up the mess, watched from one of the upper windows of the monastery by a young, bearded monk who must have thought we were out of our minds. Then a shepherd arrived to graze his sheep on the green grass under the trees. Seeing that all they would have if things were left as they were would be a diet of plastic, he also began to help us. As none of us had any matches to get a fire going, I knocked on the door of the monastery and asked the monk who answered it if he could let me have some. He did so, instantly, but showed no signs either of displeasure at the filthy mess the coach party had left behind or of pleasure at what the three of us were now doing to clean it up. Perhaps the monks quite enjoyed having coach parties picnicking on their doorstep, welcoming any kind of diversion in such a quiet spot.

Ioannina, so-named after St John the Baptist, stands on the shore of a lake in a hollow plain. Beyond it rises Mount Mitsikeli, an impressive limestone mountain nearly 6000 feet high, and the peaks of the Pindus range. It is a singularly beautiful situation; the lake edged with green reeds and watermeadows in which sheep are pastured, and behind them vineyards, green fields in which the harvest had long since taken place, fields of tobacco, and
apparently floating in it offshore, a wooded island, the site of several monasteries, the earliest of them, Nikolaos Dilios, built in the eleventh century.
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The city is noted for its fur and tanning industries and for the gold and silver embroidery and filigree work which is still carried on here by its inhabitants – Greeks, Albanians, Vlachs from what was known as Great Wallachia, otherwise Thessaly, and Jews – and their artefacts can be found in what, when we were there, were the hot, noisy, narrow streets of the bazaar which still have a distinctly Turkish air. Above all this, within the walls of the old city, was Litharítsa (otherwise known as the Demi-Kule, or Iron Fortress), the dismantled fortress of Ali Pasha, and a couple of mosques, all that remain of fourteen, one of them, the Mosque of Aslan Aga, now a museum embellished with some extremely eccentric pictures illustrating some of the more discreditable acts perpetuated by Ali Pasha. What Lear, who enjoyed himself here, described as ‘the strange gilded tomb where lies the body of the man who for so long a time made thousands tremble’ was not accessible when we were there, as it was in a military area.

We were at the end of a long journey in the company of Ali Pasha. We had first felt his cold shadow at his birthplace at Tepelenë in what is now southern Albania, where the great fortress he built stands in strange proximity to apartment blocks, at the foot of the Klissoura Mountains in a region that now produced coal, then at Parga, at Préveza, at Suli and now at Ioannina, where he came to a not untimely end.

He was born in 1744, surnamed Arslan, the Lion. He was a Tosk, the tribe or clan which inhabited, as they still do, the southern part of Albania. His father, who was a bey, a provincial
governor, died when he was fourteen and it is said that the family was subsequently dispossessed of part of its patrimony by predatory neighbours, and that his mother and sister were violated by peasants during a riot against excessive taxation. Whether this is true or not, his mother, a remarkable woman, deliberately brought him up to be both cruel and cunning and with a remarkable capacity for biding his time until the opportunity presented itself for taking what was usually a hideous revenge on those whom he considered to have wronged him or obstructed his designs. It is said that his mother murdered his half-brothers in order to have more to settle on him and that in order to make sure that there should be no impediment, he himself murdered his surviving brother. It is also said that he then imprisoned his mother for attempting to poison him and that she died while still incarcerated. Whatever the truth of these allegations, it was Hamke, his mother, who gave him command of his first robber band. Thereafter, his advancement was rapid. He married the daughter of the Pasha of Dhelvinákion, a place now in northern Greece on the southern borders of Albania, then brought about his death, as he did that of his successor. He also brought about the downfall of the rebellious Pasha of Scutari, now Shkodër in northern Albania, for which the Sublime Porte at Constantinople rewarded him not only by appointing him bey of his father’s old territory, but also by giving him the job of assistant to the Derwend-Pasha of Roumelia, a Turkish province composed of central Albania and western Macedonia, with the task of putting down brigandage. He deliberately allowed the brigands to continue unchecked and this resulted in the Derwend-Pasha being executed and Ali, thanks to his foresight in distributing bribes to the appropriate ministers in Constantinople, getting his job, being appointed not only Derwend-Pasha of Roumelia but also Pasha of Trikkala in Thessaly.