The Greek Islands (22 page)

The captains had not been wrong: a veil of dense, bluish light now fell over the harbour, the sun blazed out, and the most extraordinary calm began to fall and spread. On the horizon there were still some battle lines of sheep moving about, but the middle distance was already sighing its way back into stillness. One could smell that the night would be leaden calm, starless, humid and damp, but with only an oily swell to trouble about. Dawn would see them closing in to Crete, and with any luck they would next day sight Africa … There was a shout, and the leading vessel started to churn and sway, its engines started. More cries and gesticulations; the cavalcade assembled, bucking and stamping, and began to make its way towards the harbour entrance. On the quay, everyone stood quite still, like a Greek chorus, the blood quickened by the drama of this leave-taking with its burning emotions and its hazards. No bravado, though. The sailors turned back from time to time and waved, but nobody moved among the black-clad groups on the quay. Then, as the last boat rounded the ultimate spur, a tall, bearded sailor stretched out his arms and waved, immediately crossing
himself, and at once in silence all our hands went up in a hieratic farewell. It was only after a hush, such as might greet the ending of some great piece of music, that one heard one or two sobs from the dark ranks of the women, and then the strident chatter of the children bubbling up irrepressibly as from some hidden spring of happiness. The sponge-fleet had put to sea. The quiet animation of relief set in now, and the taverns slowly filled up with the men left behind, mostly old seafarers or landworkers. For the women, the long wait of months had begun.

Calymnos's capital is an unprepossessing little place; the narrow streets have an untended look, and it is not
surprising
that it does not enjoy the suffrage of the tourists to anything like the extent of Cos in the south and Patmos in the north. The reason, I think, is that the inhabitants think of it as more a sponge-workshop than a place of residence; and their secret is that they all have little summer houses on the western flank of the island, for which, once the good weather arrives and the fleet departs, they abandon Pothia. Anyone who coasts the western shore will certainly appreciate their preference – it is full of deserted beaches and lonely bays, perfect for bathing-picnics or work on the Differential Calculus – not to speak of the Unified Field Theory. In this lambent, fine air, one feels the pulse-beat of the ancient
pre-Socratic
philosophers: men like Heraclitus, who first posed questions we are still trying to answer satisfactorily. It is pleasant to think of them lazing about, eating olives and
spitting
the pips into their hands, as they wrestled with questions which weigh down the human reason and the intuition alike. Here and there, on the firm gold sand, you will find the scribble of gulls' feet and be reminded that the first blackboard of the thinker must have been the sand. Picking up a piece of
driftwood
, he thoughtfully drew a sacred triangle or a Pythagorean
pentacle; all this long before papyrus was discovered and the scroll born.

In this sort of island there is nothing much to do once the fleet has gone, so that you can always rent a boat or a small
caique
for a modest fee and explore the nooks and crannies of its piratical coastline. It is quite a good idea to do what Greek holidaymakers so often do, get yourself ‘marooned' for a day or a weekend. Start by borrowing a sack and filling it with a couple of blocks of ice upon which to put your beer, wine, butter, and anything else which might turn with the heat. Strike a price with your boatman to carry you to the bathing beach of your choice and Crusoe you. But if you do this,
do not
forget to take an umbrella or parasol – even several of them. The stretch of heat from midday to sundown can turn a Nordic skin to roast pork and cost the unwary person a couple of days in bed with fever; it's a fine way to ruin a holiday. Your boatman will return at evening to get you, and carry you home to harbour at
sundown
, exhausted and happy and burning (in several senses) for a cold shower and an
ouzo
with ice, plus a slice of delicious cold octopus. There is nothing to compare with the sense of
well-being
after such a day – and it is all quarried out of frugality. Greece is a wonderful school for hoggish nations; you suddenly realize that you don't need all the clobber of so-called
civilization
to achieve happiness and physical well-being. Just to think of a Paris menu, or a Los Angeles dustbin, fills one with shame, makes one queasy. How did we get to be this way – we pigs?

One
caveat
, which you will learn from your Greek friends: don't pay the boatman the full price, all in a lump. Pay an advance on the full price and the rest when you are safely home. I say this because some boatmen are forgetful creatures, and I am reminded of an occasion in Mykonos when a kindly American paid the whole fare to be Crusoe'd on Delos, without knowing that the boatman combined alcoholism with amnesia.
He was stuck for the night; and when at last he got back, his boatman was found drunk in a tavern and asserted that he had never seen the American before in his life. Although this kind of forgetfulness is relatively rare, it is worth taking precautions.

It is worth knowing, too, that in such a case you would
certainly
be able to secure redress by calling on the Tourist Police. They are a unique invention, as far as I know – a civil police force whose sole job is to watch over tourists, smooth out their difficulties, keep an eye on swindling prices. They have no
criminal
function, being a sort of
garde champêtre
, but they are very much up to the mark; and every morning they patrol the market, checking prices and running in tradesmen who try to smart-alec the tourist. In any question of altercation, you should not hesitate to call on them. They were invented by that wonderful man Karamanlis, the present Prime Minister –
certainly
the greatest Greek political figure since Venizelos. He also invented the marvellous new road system and the little
government
hotels called the Xenias. Those of us who have done Greece on foot, muleback, and in derelict, smoking buses, always covered in flea-bites, will never cease to bless the name of the man who has made everything so easy of access. It is not his fault that vulgar speculators have tried to ruin the
atmosphere
with the juke-box and transistor, with the so-called First Class Hotel – factors which only alienate the poor tourist who comes from a country where these things are manufactured, and is trying to get away from them.

I shall say little – there is little to say – about the grotto of the Seven Virgins, which lies a little way outside the town. As with so many inconvenient ancient Greek Nereids, the Orthodox church tried to make a moral story out of them. Such was their purity that, when some wicked pirates came, they retired to a cave and were never heard of again. However, they work the same miracles as their ancestors the nymphs – as you will see
from the wall inscriptions and the slips of petticoat attached here and there, even to bushes outside. If you wish to conceive, a slip of your petticoat and a prayer to them will usually do the trick. I know a lady who tried this with great success, and her son, like any Calymniot sponge-fisherman, actually went to sea when he grew up.

The Dodecanese (Twelve) Islands lie or trail down the whole length of frowning Turkey – a slender vertebral column, each one a mountain tip – linking the two big islands, Samos and Rhodes, head and tail, so to speak. Perhaps ‘frowning' is a trifle unkind, though the Turkish mountain ranges overtop the island hills and seem free from all life that is not nomadic. Yet the fate of this group of islands has always been actively linked to the present Turkish mainland, and it is only in recent times that they have found themselves cut off. I suspect that the Asia Minor disaster, that foolish Greek campaign, was one of the causes, and that it has left a traumatic wound in the sly and secretive Turkish temperament, rather as the repeated invasions by Germany have affected the French. It is not possible to
convince
an ordinary Frenchman that Germany is now no longer belligerent; he won't swallow it. So I think a good deal of heady, Greek propaganda about The Great Idea of a Greater Greece overseas has made the Turks suspicious and unco-operative. Where does this Great Idea come from? Perhaps it is some absurd vestigial reaction, echoing the ancient Greek expansion into Italy and Sicily … No, this can't be true, because each little colony – Rhodes, Corinth, Athens, and so on – acted separately, and they were often at war with each other. It is more likely to be some relic of a Byzantine pipe-dream. But whatever its origin, its consequence was fatal to two neighbours who have need of each other. Much of ancient Greek history took place over the water – Troy, Halicarnassus, are still there to be visited; while in more recent times, one has only to read a novel like
Aeolia
by
Venezis to realize how much the Greeks felt at home in Turkey and what a wrench it was for them to find themselves ‘exiled' to places like Athens or Salonika. Think of Smyrna in flames, of Ataturk … The Greeks have always been hasty, intemperate and great chatterboxes, while the Turks by temperament are shy, secretive and literal-minded. When they lived side by side, they got on famously. Even in Byron's day not all pachas were tyrants; as a breed, they were mostly lazy and profligate, were dumb and could be bribed. The Greeks I knew from Asia Minor have a real, amused affection for the Turks. In Rhodes, one told me that when they wanted impartial and fair legal judgment on some matter under arbitration, they asked a Turkish
mufti
to pronounce on it and accepted what he said.

The Dodecanese lingered long under Turkish rule; but they were referred to as the ‘Privileged Islands' since they enjoyed tax exemptions and special privileges granted in the age of Suleiman the Magnificent. These they kept right up until 1908, when the islands united against Turkish rule – egged on by
you-know
-who. They were liberated in 1912, and Greece was
promised
that they would be restored to her at the end of the war. However, at the Treaty of Sèvres, the promise simply evaporated and they were given to Italy as a reward for her war services. It was not until 1948 that they returned to Greece; yet they have always been as distinctively Greek as any other Aegean island. One wonders how the Greeks have managed to keep their affection for the British in spite of all this jobbery.

Though the word ‘Dodecanese' was not officially applied to them until 1908, they must always have been thought of as a group of twelve, as they are so referred to by a Byzantine chronicler as early as 758 or thereabouts.

The most northerly, and in a queer sort of way the most anomalous, of the group is Patmos, which lies like a tortoise in a spatter of atolls, sculpturally rather fine, but not scenically
outstanding. What makes it seem strange is that it is wholly a Christian island, with no whiff of ancient Greece about it. There seems to be no trace there of the usual succession of invasions, or Neolithic habitations, or whatnot. It suddenly emerges in full glory with the
Apocalypse
, that strange,
transcendental
poem which is worthy of an early Dylan Thomas. The mere fact that the
Apocalypse
was born in the lugubrious hole that the monks still show you with pride and awe instantly puts Patmos into the top class of poetic evocation.

The monastery on top of the island is grimly beautiful in a rather reproachful way, and it crowns perfectly the small
oatcake
of the island, which has practically no green, is nearly all uncompromising stone. Seven hills, seven letters, seven
candlesticks
, seven stars … The punch-drunk numerologist who gave us this magnificent doom-laden poem is said to have conceived and executed it in a cave, over which there stands now a chapel dedicated to St Anne and the
Apocalypse
. Here the resident monk will show you not only a picture of St Anne, but also the hole in the rock which was riven by the voice of God as it came upon St John. The whole extravanganza was taken down at the speed of revelation itself, presumably in shorthand, by his
disciple
, Prochorus, who used a protruding piece of wall as a desk. It reads magnificently in our English version – as richly as a Welsh nervous breakdown at an Eisteddfod. On the wall, a
silver
halo marks the spot where the Apostle laid his head to rest. The place is inconceivably gloomy in winter – my last visit was during a storm. The wind howls outside and, inside the dark rock-chamber, you hear the mountain teeming with invisible springs, the noise of water everywhere macerating pebbles, the drip, drip of rain at the entrance. The monk of that epoch was a sad rascal, who looked like a half-drowned spaniel but was clearly very superstitious, for he crossed himself ardently every time the wind moaned. I was glad to get out and back to the
port where my companion had brewed up in a tavern with no window panes. Pencils of white light moved about the sky like searchlights in the pitch-dark afternoon. It was only three in the afternoon, and yet lights had to be lighted. Successive flashes of lightning flared on the windows of the monastery high up on the crown of the hill. I pitied poor Prochorus at his stone desk, taking down this elaborate poem with its Asiatic images. The site of the revelation was neglected for centuries, and it was only in 1088 that the Emperor Alexis Comnenos granted the place to St Christodoulos for the founding of a monastery.

When one thinks how rife piracy was in these waters at that time, one wonders whether the emperor's gift was a polite way of exiling an awful bore. Whether or no, it was an act of great temerity to start off and found a monastery in so unprotected a place. Nevertheless, the old saint set about building and the result of his labours and that of several generations after him is still here for us to admire. It is all painted stark white, and the towers and steeples are patterned in cubist motifs of great beauty, without a trace of prettiness. From the top, walking the ramparts of this lowering castle, you can see that Patmos is formed from three masses of metamorphic rock, all but severed from each other. Port Scala, an excellent lie-in when there is high wind or a brutal sea, is a deep-cut fjord which all but sections the island into two parts. The site of the ancient town was down here when, for a brief while, it was an Ionian
settlement
; later on, the Romans exiled troublesome politicians here. The rest is anonymity and piracy until the good St
Christodoulos
came along; and the strength and strategic positioning of his great castle-monastery shows to what extent the place had to be made defensible. The body of its founder lies in a casket in a chapel full of squirming Byzantine decoration whose murky splendour is impressive but not very uplifting. As for St John … it does not seem absolutely certain that the great
document he produced was written in Patmos at all; we know only that Domitian had him exiled here about
AD
95. What is curious is that the ‘Acts of St John', a work of pious hagiography written by his disciple, Prochorus, deals with all the miracles he performed in the island but does not actually mention that the
Apocalypse
was written here. Anyway, the book itself was never accepted by the Orthodox and figures in the
Apocrypha
. It was just too good.