Roumeli (8 page)

Charon
[25]
is a permanent presence and the most natural of companions: “He is always there,” they say, as Trappist monks are supposed to do; “remember him three times a day.” A nomad that perishes in the mountains goes unhouseled and unaneled. If he should perish on the road—and their two yearly migrations, geared to the slow gait of the flocks, may take twenty-five or thirty days—he is laid across a pack beast and, after unloading, a candle is lit for him three evenings running and a cup of wine placed for his soul to drink from. If a
tsellingas
falls mortally ill, the bells are muffled, and if he dies,
all the animals, even the bell-wethers, are disarmed in mourning. When men turn fifty and women thirty all the nomads, however hale they are, travel with their
nekrallaxia
, or death-change: a new suit of clothes to be buried in. Clad in its new attire, the body is laid pointing away from the sun on the floor of his hut or his tent with his hands and feet bound together. The young are decked with flowers, and rings are put on their fingers and a wreath round their brows; an ikon is placed at their head and an oil-dip at their feet. Relations watch over the dead all night lest a dog, a cat or a hen should walk over them. Finally the body is wrapped in a woollen blanket or two goats' hair cloaks and then borne away to burial on a bier of branches and leaves. As it is carried out, somebody breaks a wooden spoon, and no one looks back for fear of Charon, who lurks behind them in search of fresh prey. In the old days, they buried the body without a priest: “he died unchanted” the phrase goes. Before the earth covers him, his hands and feet are unbound and his new clothes are torn, so that he may move more freely “to where he is going.” If a shrine were handy, there they would lay him; but a shepherd dying in the mountains was often buried below a rock or on the top of a slope whence he could look down on his flocks, should they return another year. His crook was planted nearby and a woman's grave was marked by her distaff with its spindle and thread. She was buried with all her rings and chains and earrings and her festival array of gold coins. When her relations went to dig them up again, after three, five or seven years, to translate the bones in a box or a bag (as they do all over Greece), these trinkets were retrieved, washed and handed on to the children. Occasionally the bones of the skeleton are found to be rigid, “not to be cut”; this means that the deceased has turned into a vampire, and it calls for priestly intervention and exorcism and the body is left another year to loosen up. Mourning for a dead son lasted for five years, and, to emphasize this sad period, women sometimes wore
their clothes back to front. The two traditional hours of the day for the renewal of lamentation are sunset and the dim hour before daybreak when the first crows begin to caw.

All this is a far cry from Daphnis and Chloe, a long way from Theocritus and Moschus and Bion. The shepherds of Virgil are farther away still, early milestones on a flowery path that meanders through the scenery of Herrick and Windsor Forest and Fragonard and Watteau to the Petit Trianon and Sèvres. The attributes of the Good Shepherd in the New Testament and the virtuous, rather simple image that the shepherd's calling conjures up in the west are equally irrelevant.

Shepherds that live in the plains have little interest. Those of the mountains are active, lean, spare, hawk-eyed men, with features scooped and chiselled by sun, wind, rain, snow and hail. They give more than an impression, during their occasional descents to the lowlands, of their enemies the wolves, and, still more, of eagles. They live beyond the reach of the authorities, and, as we have seen, the border between pastoral life and lawlessness is often vague. They spell, in fact, independence and inviolacy. Sky and space surround them. When I think of the whiskered, black-clad, booted, turbanned and bandoliered mountaineers of Crete, the word “shepherd” and all its Western European associations no longer applies. Surrounded by half-wild flocks, they live in an anarchy of landslides and chasms and spikes of mineral. One chances on them suddenly, sitting on ledges of limestone above the ilex-belt and the clouds with rifles across their knees ready loaded against flock-rustlers from a hostile village or family foes bent on the blood feud. All over the Greek peninsula, these men represent exemption; and the most unhampered and nonconformist of all, except for their private and tribal straitjackets of untransgressable behaviour,
are the Sarakatsáns. They belong to an older and shaggier scene than Arcadia and Greek Sicily, antedating the idyll and surviving the eclogue by near-eternities.

My first glimpse of them was in December, when I was nineteen, on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria between Varna and Burgas; I saw them again early next spring in Macedonia, during the 1935 Venizelist revolution, after the battle at the bridge of Orliako.

For reasons too long to expound I was trotting eastwards along the Aemilian Way through the late March afternoon on a borrowed
[26]
horse with a friendly squadron of light cavalry in the victorious army of General Kondylis. We were slightly in advance of the main royalist army, which, with its cannon and infantry and trucks and waggons and baggage train, snaked away behind us in a long loop of dust. The march had turned into something of a carnival. After the musketry fire on both banks of the Struma
[27]
and the shelling from the hills behind (which I had watched from an empty stork's nest in the top of an elm) and a minimum of casualties on either side, resistance had caved in and our opponents were surrendering or dispersing eastwards. The day had culminated, for my new friends and for me, in the moment when they had drawn their sabres and thundered fast but bloodlessly across the wooden bridge of Orliako against an already vanished enemy in the nearest that any of us would ever get to a cavalry charge. Buoyed along the road by exhilaration and relief, my companions were singing music-hall songs from the Athens I had not yet seen. They unslung their carbines and took pot-shots from the saddle at the birds on the telegraph lines. Beyond the heads of all these cheerful horsemen, on a high wooded ridge about three miles
away, a string of those dark wigwams loomed that had intrigued me in December. I decided to defect from my companions for a night, and (one horseman moving faster than any army) catch up next day by short-cuts across the mountains. After light-hearted farewells and shouted rendezvous to drink together in Serres and Drama and Komotini, I watched them jingle away, their spurs clinking against the steel scabbards of their sabres; then pounded off towards the hills and the far-sounding goat-bells.

I drew rein towards sunset at the heart of a raucous whirl-pool of half-wild dogs. A
stani
of about fifty huts was scattered among the trees round a spring. The place was alive with bleating and barking and bells, and gold with evening dust. Followed by their shrill young, the ewes and the she-goats were being driven with shouts and whirling crooks and the heckling of dogs and ear-sundering whistles into a semi-circular pen of wicker and thatch on a steep slope. Once inside, they were herded towards a narrow lych-gate at one end where shepherds seized them by their horns or their hind legs and milked them under protest, a few deft seconds for each, into bronze cauldrons. A strange arrival in the country unlooses a friendly hubbub of curiosity and inquisition in Greece. Not so here. The aloof drovers doubled the diligence of their tasks: shouts became louder, the milking more urgent. For the first time, I saw these Biblical men at close range; their black cloaks and their hoods gave them the look of Benedictines who had gone native. There were glimpses—rising from their dim looms and appearing for a moment in the threshold of the smoke-plumed cones and vanishing again—of the stunning magpie geometry of the women. An authoritative old man with a walrus moustache and an elaborate crook silenced the dogs and asked what I wanted. I could understand little of what he said: I had spent the few previous weeks, my first in Greece, in snowy Mount Athos, trying to convert imperfect ancient Greek into the rudiments of the
modern; and the Sarakatsán dialect was a further barrier. When they had gathered that, in spite of patched breeches and puttees, I was not a soldier—no sword or gun!—in fact a foreigner from England, alone, and too young and as yet unpredatory-looking to be capable of much harm, their reserve began to melt. What was going on? They pointed at the army glinting across the plain through a long cocoon of dust; the note of a trumpet came softly to our ears. What had all that noise been about by the Struma?
Bam-boum-boum? Rat-tat-tat-tat? N'tang n'tang?
...I gleaned with surprise from their half-understood questions that they had only the roughest notion of what was afoot. They knew that there had been a
kinema
—a movement or revolution—but little more. (Now it occurs to me that they might have been prudently waiting to see what sort of a bird I was; what tobacco I smoked, as the phrase goes.) It seemed scarcely credible that they were unapprised of events which had taken place so few miles away and split the whole of Greece in two; as I learnt later, they had filled the headlines of the world's newspapers for the whole of the last week. Anyway, eagerly or ironically, they listened to my stumbling, gesticulating, half-ancient and half-modern onomatopoea-laced pantomime of the tidings: the revolt of half the armed forces in favour of Venizelos, the bombardments in Athens and Attica, the advance of the government forces through Salonica to the Struma river, the battle at the bridge; how the mutinied battleship
Averoff
had sailed away to Crete: how Venizelos himself had fled, probably to Rhodes, while the Macedonian leaders retreated to Thrace and, perhaps, into Bulgaria. A score of hooded nomads had gathered round us leaning on their crooks and clicking their tongues deprecatingly at the right moments; joined, in the background, by spinning papoose-laden women and geometric girls and boys with kids and lambs slung across their shoulders. When I finished, their weatherbeaten faces, prompted possibly by the idiom in which this
communiqué
had been
delivered, had lost their sternness; the blue-grey eyes of the beetling despot who had first spoken assumed a paternal look. “
É! paidí mou
,” he said, with a cheerful expression that clashed with his words, “
kakos einai o polemos
...war's a bad thing, my child.” Then, over his shoulder, he said, “The boy must be hungry.” I clambered down, a fairhaired descendant took my horse and another the saddle-bags and the saddle and a bag of oats and we headed through the dusk for the huts.

By the time we had finished the hot milk with black bread broken into it and sprinkled with hammered salt—their only food it seemed, which we all spooned in unison out of the same dish—about forty shepherds were eagerly settled, unshod and cross-legged on the spread blankets, nursing their crooks round a fire of thorns in the centre of the great domed hut. Half a dozen dogs lay panting in the doorway. The old man's oakapple-jointed fingers kept pushing a minute saucepan into the embers; and we hissed and gulped in turn over a single cup refilled with scalding and bubbling coffee. A shepherd sliced handfuls of tobacco leaves on a log with a long knife, then rolled them and genteelly offered the rough cylinders for the smoker to lick shut and light with a twig. The day's halting saga, the oddity of its language evoking friendly laughter from time to time, was demanded all over again and discussed till long after it was dark.

Scarcely anything in the hut had not been made by the nomads themselves. Their household goods hung on pegs and on the looped and fire-darkened stumps of branches jutting from the hut's timbers. Some were neatly piled against the brushwood walls, or spread underfoot: few clues singled out our surroundings for any particular period in the last few millennia: guns, tools, choppers, adzes, spades, billhooks, cooking pots, saddles, harness, the tin frills round the ikons and, among a pendant grove of dried and shaggy waterskins, a gleaming branchful of new horseshoes. Otherwise, all was hewn and
carved wood or homespun from the backs of the flocks. Strings of onions, garlic, maize-cobs and tobacco leaves hung aloft among the sooty twigs and the cobwebs. Higher still the osier-bound reeds of the thatch converged symmetrically in the apex of the dome. An agreeable and pungent aroma of milk, curds, goats' hair, tobacco and woodsmoke filled the place. The thorns on the fire crackled smokelessly; when a new faggot was thrown on, the flames made the tall hut dance in a gold hollow above a mob of shadows and highlit the bleached and matted hair and those faces shaped by the blasts of winter and the summer solstice. Their features glittered like the surfaces on a flint and whenever my eyes met any of theirs, a smile of welcoming friendliness answered.

I had begun to grasp, in the past few weeks, one of the great and unconvenanted delights of Greece; a pre-coming-of-age present in my case: a direct and immediate link, friendly and equal on either side, between human beings, something which melts barriers of hierarchy and background and money and, except for a few tribal and historic feuds, politics and nationality as well. It is not a thing which functions in the teeth of convention, but in almost prelapsarian unawareness of its existence. Self-consciousness, awe and condescension (and their baleful remedy of forced egalitarianism), and the feudal hangover and the post-Fall-of-the-Bastille flicker—all the gloomy factors which limit the range of life and deoxygenize the air of Western Europe, are absent. Existence, these glances say, is a torment, an enemy, an adventure and a joke which we are in league to undergo, outwit, exploit and enjoy on equal terms as accomplices, fellow-hedonists and fellow-victims. A stranger begins to realize that the armour which has been irking him and the arsenal he has been lugging about for half a life-time are no longer needed. Miraculous lightness takes their place. On this particular evening the exhilaration was reinforced by other things: my mind was full of the events of the day, the smell of gunpowder,
the cannon-fire at dawn which had achieved the innocence of fireworks as the bangs had echoed upstream; the first glimpse, in fact, of warfare. By then I felt I had almost taken part in the battle. The hoofs hammering over the loose planks of the bridge still rang in my ears and the songs on the long ride. On top of this came the beautiful ascent through the foothills, the sunset arrival at the encampment, and now, the voices and laughter and the gold firelit masks of the nomads in this hut in the dark mountains; the tiredness of limb, the feeling of being lost in time and geography with months and years hazily sparkling ahead in a prospect of unconjecturable magic—the fusion of all this made it seem that life, at that moment, had nothing more to offer.