Roumeli (2 page)

For Amy and Walter Smart
 

 

R
OUMELI
is not to be found on maps of present-day Greece. It is not a political or an administrative delimitation but a regional, almost a colloquial, name; rather like, in England, the West or the North Country, the Fens or the Border. Its extent has varied and its position has wandered rather imprecisely. A few centuries ago it meant roughly the north of the country (as opposed to the Morea, the archipelago and the Greek-inhabited provinces of Asia Minor) from the Bosphorus to the Adriatic Sea and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth. After the War of Independence, the name shrank to designate the southern part of this great area; the mountainous strip of territory lying between the Gulf and the northern frontier that separated the new Greek Kingdom from the unredeemed lands that still remained, politically, part of the Ottoman Empire. The line stretched from the Ambracian Gulf to the Gulf of Volo. The Balkan Wars and then the Great War advanced Greece's frontiers in two great northward leaps and doubled the extent of the country; but, on modern Greek lips, Roumeli is still limited to that part of it between the Gulf and the superannuated line. Rather arbitrarily, rather high-handedly and with some misgiving, perhaps seduced by the strangeness and the beauty of the name—the stress falls on the first syllable, turning Roumeli into a dactyl—I have reverted, as cover for these wanderings, to the earlier and looser application of the name. This obsolete and elastic use simultaneously provides an alibi
from the strict modern sense and an illusory semblance of unity to these random journeys. Better still, the trisyllable itself is full of echoes and hints and buried meanings which are deeply relevant to the book's main theme.

Greece is changing fast and the most up-to-the-minute account of it is, in some measure, out of date by the time it appears. The record of these journeys, then, undertaken a few years ago and all of them prompted by abstruse private motives, would be a deluding guide. Commodious charabancs have now replaced the ramshackle country buses, great roads cleave their way through the heart of remote villages and quantities of hotels have sprung up. Monasteries and temples which, almost yesterday, were only to be reached by solitary and exacting climbs are now the brief staging points of highly organized and painless tourism in multitudes. For the first time since Julian the Apostate, fumes drift through the columns, and a traveller must retire deep into the hinterland for the wireless to be out of earshot. All this is a source of direly-needed revenue and a joy to many; the occasional Greek or foreign dissenter can always stalk off petulantly into the wilderness and out of range. Indeed, it is into this contracting wilderness that these pages for the most part lead.

A list of all the Greek friends who have helped with advice, guidance, hospitality, criticism and every conceivable support would be impressively large; but not nearly as large as the debt I owe them for many years of kindness, stimulus, and delight. I would also like to thank other allies for their patience and forbearing during a long gestation. The only sad aspect of the task of rendering thanks is the thought that this book will only reach one of the two friends to whom it was dedicated at the outset.

 

—P.M.L.F.

St. Fermin—Passerano nel Lazio—Forio—Locronan—Lismore—Dumbleton—Branscombe—Sevenhampton—Kalomitsi
.

A
LEXANDROUPOLIS
is a large town, but there is nothing overpoweringly urban about the Alexandroupolitans; rather the reverse. Athenian civil servants groan when they are nominated here and young officers, faced by this Thracian exile, look at each other askance. (It was not always so. In the tales of my friend Yanni Peltekis, who lived here in Turkish times as a child, it sounds as full of adventure and mystery as a city in the
Arabian Nights
.) I had taken a strong liking to it, perhaps because it was my first Greek town after a few years' absence. But I could see that too long a sojourn might wither its delights.
[1]
Many of the limitations of a new provincial town pervade it, and the evening hours of the officers and civil servants are spanned by familiar anecdotes and yawns and yet another coffee and the click of amber beads falling through fingers that refrain from raising a cuff to reveal the time; they know full well that it is still too early for bed. The tedium of unchosen and unchanging company lurks there. If a joke is worth making, it is worth making often, think some; other more fastidious ones suffer acutely from the Inbite of Agenwit.

All at once, however, the yawns of the evening boulevard were halted by the passing of a wild, solitary and alien figure
that no streets or houses should ever have confined: a man as inappropriate in these tame surroundings as a wolf in the heart of Athens. A rough black pill-box was tilted askew on his matted and whiskered head. His black double-breasted waistcoat of homespun goats' hair was tucked into a black sash below which a hairy and broad-pleated black kilt jutted stiffly to his knees. Black tights of the same stifling stuff covered his long legs and he was shod in those Greek mountain shoes that turn up at the tip and curl back in a broad canoe-like prow and end in a wide black pom-pom covering the front of the foot. The thick soles were clouted and the nails grated underfoot. He loped along the middle of the road, gazing ahead as though to avoid the contaminating houses. A long shepherd's staff, whose crook was a carved wooden snake, lay across his shoulders. He had looped his arms over it in the flying and cruciform position in which many mountaineers carry their crooks and their guns. He was, in fact, a Sarakatsán. Heads turned under the dusty acacias as he passed and the smack of cards and the clatter of backgammon counters died down for a few moments. I got up and dogged his steps at a discreet distance.

Sarakatsáns have always filled me with awe. I first saw them years ago when I was walking across Bulgaria to Constantinople. A gathering of beehive huts was scattered over the wintry hills slanting to the Black Sea; brushwood folds ascended the green slopes and thousands of shaggy black goats and sheep grazed over the rainy landscape, their heavy bronze bells filling the air with a many-toned and harmonious jangle. Here and there like dark monoliths under the wheeling crows herdsmen leaned on their lance-long crooks, their faces almost lost in the deep hoods of high-shouldered goats' hair capes reaching to the ground; capes of so coarse a weave and so stiff with rain that their incumbents could almost step forth and leave them standing like sentry-boxes. Riding across Greek Macedonia the next year, I saw them again and even stayed a night in one of their
smoky wigwams. Later I met them often, all over northern Greece: in the plains in winter and in the mountains in summer; always on the skyline or in the middle distance. True nomads, these self-appointed Ishmaels hover on the outskirts of ordinary Greek life as fleetingly as a mirage; they manifest themselves to mortals in faraway glimpses. Suddenly, in the high mid-summer Pindus and Rhodope and in the Roumeli sierras, a ravine's twist lays bare their impermanent hamlets of cones. In winter, from the snows that have banished them, one can discern their clustering huts in the plains, the ascending smoke and the grazing flocks. In spring their beasts and their long caravans of horses, laden with all they possess, wind into the thawed mountains, halting at night in a brief village of sombre tents; autumn sends them streaming downhill to the withered plains which the rains will soon turn green. One discovers them binding lopped branches and osier twigs into the hemispherical huts which will house them for the season; shelters whose blackened and moulting thatch will later mark where they settled for a few months and then vanished. Sometimes a far-off barking and the murmur of bells hints at their presence deep in the ilex woods or along a dazzling canyon where nothing stirs but a pair of floating eagles. They are nearly always out of sight. Except for these rare apparitions, this fugitive community—about eighty thousand souls with flocks amounting to several million heads—has the gift of invisibility.

Unlike the semi-nomads of Greece—the Koutzovlachs and the Karagounis, who all have mountain villages from which to migrate and to which they return after their half-yearly journeys in search of pasture—the Sarakatsáns have nothing more solid than their abodes of wicker and rush. All of them, however, look to some range of mountains as their home, some fold or cordillera where they have grazed their flocks for centuries of summers. Their lowland pastures are more variable; these uncertain sojourns have few claims on their allegiance. The
Sarakatsáns of the north had the widest range. The sudden cage of frontiers which sprang up after the Balkan Wars failed to confine them and they fanned out in autumn all over southern Albania and across the lower marches of Serbia as far as Montenegro and Herzegovina and Bosnia and into Bulgaria to the foothills of the Great Balkan. Those who thought of the Rhodope mountains as their home—the very ones, indeed, in the highlands that loom above the Thracian plains—were particularly bold in the extent of their winter wanderings. Not only did they strike northwards, like those I saw by the Black Sea, but, before the Hebrus river became an inviolable barrier, their caravans reached Constantinople and up went their wigwams under the walls of Theodosius. Others settled along the shores of the Sea of Marmara and spread over the rich green hills of the Dardanelles. Many crossed the Hellespont to pitch camp on the plain of Troy. Bold nomads would continue to the meadows of Bithynia and winter among the poplar trees or push on into Cappadocia and scatter their flocks across the volcanic wildernesses round the rock monasteries of Ürgüb. The boldest even reached Iconium, the home of Jellalludin and the metropolis of the whirling dervishes. They never looked on these enormous journeys as expatriation: until the deracination of the 1920's, much of Asia Minor was part of the Greek world; and even beyond its confines there were ancient Greek colonies. Established for thousands of years but reduced by the later tide of the Seldjuk Turks to scattered islets of Hellenism, they still survived and prospered. The invisible frontiers of nomadism overlapped and dovetailed with those other pastoral wanderers, the Yürüks. These Anatolian shepherds, nominally moslems, grazed their flocks in the hinterland of Asia Minor for centuries before the Seldjuks came; they even paid return migrations, now and then, as far as Macedonia. No wonder, then, that some of the aura of a fable hangs about the Sarakatsáns.

A quarter of an hour after sighting him I was sitting at a table next to this isolated nomad. Round us were the smithies and harness-makers of the outskirts; old artisans had settled down to quiet narghilés after knocking off work. I watched him order and drink a coffee, pondering how I could get into conversation. Soon, with a clap of horny palms, he was summoning the
kafedzi
and preparing to depart. The
kafedzi
came with an armload of elaborate gear and a boy leading a horse. The Sarakatsán mounted and laid his crook across his lap, the
kafedzi
handed him two six-foot candles adorned with white satin bows and ribbons; then followed the snowy baubles which, as I know to my cost, a
koumbaros
—the groomsman, sponsor or best man—contributes to the crowning of the groom and his bride at an Orthodox wedding. There were smaller candles, lengths of satin in brown paper, parcels of sweets and finally the box containing the tinsel wedding-crowns themselves. My luck changed: as he gave his horse a kick and moved off, a muslin bag of sugared almonds slipped and fell into the dust. I dived for it, ran after him, and, my luck still holding, remembered as I handed it over, to utter the ritual phrase of a wedding guest to a
koumbaros
; it is adapted either from the tenth chapter of St. Luke or the First Epistle to Timothy: “
Axioi tou misthou sou!
,” “May they be worthy of your hire!” He reined in, placed his right hand over his heart and bowed his head in a ceremonious gesture of thanks. Then, after a glance up and down and a pause, he asked in a thick rustic accent where I was from. I told him and asked him where the wedding was to be. “Tomorrow at Sikarayia,” he said, “two hours from here.” After another pause, he said, “Honour us by coming.” He repeated his graceful bow and, bristling with his crook and his candles and fluttering with satin ribbons, clattered off.

Next day the rail ran parallel to the Aemilian Way, the legions' road from the Adriatic to Constantinople: a thread on which Alexandroupolis and a dozen more ancient cities are strung.

The carriage that bore us along a narrow-gauge track seemed obsolete as an equipage in a museum. High and narrow, the coachwork was painted to mimic the graining of yellow wood and upholstered in threadbare tasselled velvet. This delightful carriage, fit for two travellers out of Jules Verne, carried us swaying through the Thracian sky and over the gorges and forests of plane trees, the rocky river beds and the scrub-mantled mountainsides at an abnormal height. The ancient Thracians used to hold their mares with their heads downwind in order that the wind might put them in foal. Over which of the Rhodope passes did this invisible stallion come snorting? Every so often we passed solitary police posts and lookout platforms on stilts, each one a pedestal for an armed and helmeted soldier; reminders of the nearness and the danger of the Bulgarian frontier. Asprawl among trees and bracken, blown there by guerrilla mines, the rusty remains of carriages were gloomy mementoes of the civil war. The country shook in the noonday.