The Greek Islands (28 page)
Authors: Lawrence Durrell
The jump from Naxos to Paros is also a jump from one poet to another, one age to another; for Paros is the
lieu
d’élection
of the poet Seferis, who used to claim with smiling diffidence that it was the loveliest of all the Cyclades and that the organization of its streets and squares aspired to the condition of music. Here he liked to spend his summers, walking among the brilliantly variegated colour schemes of the little town,
worrying
at his verses like a hound. In truth it is much prettier than Naxos and has some of that indefinable beatitude which comes from a truly perfect siting of its capital in relation to the
prevailing
winds. Both Aphrodite and the Delian Apollo had shrines here and, while there is no magic, healing icon, the feast of the Assumption on 15 August is celebrated here with as much fervour as it is in Tinos.
What is the secret of its charm – the feeling of zestful ease it gives you while you navigate those dazzling white streets
punctuated
with whole balconies and bowers of flowers in bloom? The two long, main streets are more or less parallel, and they have been criss-crossed and stitched with interconnecting lanes of pure whiteness, which give the impression of being simply felicitous afterthoughts. The town, once symmetrically laid out, has been scribbled over by an absent-minded god. I think that is what Seferis liked about it, its unexpectedness. Every day, when you awake, it seems quite fresh, as though finished in the night and opened to the public just this morning. The standard Venetian castle rides the traditional acropolis crown of the ancient city. The ancient stone has been run into the old walls in a most flagrant way, and here and there you will find rows of drums and columns seized from a now vanished temple to Hera. So one age wolfs the glories of its predecessor. But any architect will tell you how wonderful it is to find one’s building material already on site. Given the Naxian’s disrespectful attitude towards antiquity, it is lucky that the famous Parian marble remains (though half of it is in Oxford) – which, among other things, gives us a possible date for the birth of Homer (regarded as apocryphal by the scholars).
The famous Parian marble, with its sweet, almost translucent blond colour, is not being mined any more – or it was not when last I was there. They told me that the seam had been a slender one and was exhausted. However, a visit to the old quarry, where all those choice cuts came from, suggests otherwise: indeed I think it would be possible even today to have a large block for a statue cut from this fine stone. The light sinks deep into its surface and reflects back from way inside – giving an impression of lightness and transparency. Later sculptors such as Michelangelo and Canova became enamoured of white Carrara, but in my opinion this famous Greek stone is superior.
The quarries, which lie some way off the main road to Naoussa, were deserted when I was there. A few tumbledown buildings marked a fleeting attempt by a French company to re-open the seams and market the marble. But the project failed.
Walking about the cuttings in the blazing heat – there is a delightful little wall-relief to the nymphs, obviously carved by a sculptor who was waiting for his block to be cut and trimmed – my thoughts turned to my first lesson in ancient Greek in
faraway
London around 1925. I went to a small Elizabethan
grammar
school in Southwark for a couple of terms, where Mr Gammon, who always seemed a trifle drunk, and articulated somewhat thickly, showed me what a devil the Attic grammar is: ‘Inflected languages
are
hell.’ More than this he introduced his pupils to the Greek aesthetic by holding up a battered
picture
of the Venus de Milo and saying: ‘What do you think they were up to? Were they just trying to make us tingle with lust? Certainly not!’ And he banged his desk violently. Then he
lowered
his voice and said in a grave tone: ‘They were asking
themselves
what beauty was, and whether it lay in proportion.’ He swept us with his gin-swept glance and sighed. It was a
memorable
remark in spite of its depravity and, for me, it went deep; long afterwards, reading Longus, and thinking about the
proportions
of the Acropolis with the help of Vitruvius, I
remembered
Gammon gratefully. The point he made is worth making again today.
I also owe to him the story of the acanthus pattern which crowns the Corinthian column. A young and beautiful
Corinthian
girl became ill and died. After she was buried, her nurse placed all her treasures in a basket and, lest she should feel lonely without them, placed the basket upon the tomb, over the roots of an acanthus plant. She covered the basket against the weather with a tile. When spring came the acanthus grew its leaves around the basket. The tile bent them back. The keen eye
of Callimachus, who was passing, fell upon this striking
combination
of forms and he adopted the motif for the Corinthian column which he was just designing. So the head of this column – the most perfect of the Greek style – became a monument to a young girl who died some 2500 years ago. It is an attractive story.
Gammon also had much to tell us about the Greek temple, which he insisted was not merely a house, or even a church, but a sort of mathematical declaration of the male and female
principle
raised to its highest power. In their search for the Golden Mean, they were haunted by the Ideal of Perfection. Where did it reside? The admirable Vitruvius has left us some rich and thoughtful observations on the architectural problems the Greeks faced. The passage is so useful to remember when you confront ancient Greek sculpture, that I make no excuse for copying it out in full, since Vitruvius is not easy to get hold of today.
When Ion had founded thirteen colonies in Caria – among them Ephesus and Miletus – the immigrants began to build temples to the immortals, such as they had seen in Achaia, and first of all to Apollo Panionic. When they were about to set up the columns in this temple they could no longer recall the measurements. While they were
considering
how to make them at once trustworthy and graceful it occurred to them to measure a man’s foot and compare it with his height. Finding that the foot measured a sixth part of the height they applied this to the column by laying off its lowest diameter six times along the length of the column, inclusive of the capital. Thus did the Doric column begin to represent the compressed beauty of the male body in building.
The Roman goes on to explain that for Diana’s Temple a female slenderness was the architect’s model.
At the bottom they laid a foot like a sole; into the capital they
introduced snails, which hung down right and left like artificially curled locks; on the forehead they put rolls and bunches of fruit for hair, and down the whole shaft they made grooves to resemble the folds in female attire. Thus in the two styles of column they invented, the one was copied from the naked and unadorned body of the man, the other from the dainty figure of an adorned woman. But those who came later, with a more critical and finer taste, preferred less
massiveness
and accordingly fixed the height of the Doric column at seven and of the Ionian at nine times the diameter.
He goes on to add that the Corinthian column emulates the slenderness of a virgin. If some scholars doubt the authenticity of all this, it is at least highly suggestive, and useful to bear in mind when looking at Greek work.
If you straggle back to the road from the blazing quarries, and go on to Naoussa, you will find a delightful little fishing village with the usual Venetian fort cresting it. Among these ruins, when trying to pick flowers, I alerted a couple of large reddish scorpions and was happy to escape their stings. A
scorpion
sting is very painful and there seems to be no treatment for it. The swimming, in a cove nearby, was fine, and I was sorry to get on the road again.
I recall other
dicta
by Mr Gammon –
dicta
full of fungus, you might say, for that low voice was furry with drink. ‘What is the message of the caryatids, my boy, tell me that? What, you don’t know? I will tell you.’ Leaning forward on his desk he said: ‘Every girl has a duty to look ever so slightly pregnant.’ This was when we were alone – I had been kept in to write a hundred lines while he invigilated; he would never have dared to say anything so improper to the whole class. I have often wondered if Gammon managed a trip to the Greece he so much adored – where his queer Erasmic pronunciation would have seemed laughable, as I realized when I heard live Greeks talk. And it takes time to adjust from school Greek of the
‘What Ho on The Rialto’ kind to the five diphthongs of the modern tongue.
It may seem a bit odd to be thinking of Mr Gammon in
faraway
smoky London while wandering about the quarries of Paros; but it is thanks to enthusiasts like him that one culture secures a foothold in another. Gammon planted in me so many observations, like barbs, that I early had a feeling of familiarity with the Greek thing. And I was not surprised to discover when I got there that Greece was almost exactly as he had taught me that it might be. Watching Paros slowly fading into the trembling amethyst dusk of the summer night, I could hear Gammon’s voice in my ear again. He was talking about 480
BC
, in the heart of Cockney London, not far from Tooley Street with its roaring and howling drays racing beer barrels down to the wharf at Tower Bridge. (The oxen of the sun, Gammon might have called them for his mind was full of Homer.)
You will say the Persians were utter rotters and I agree. But here and there there was a spark. Even Xerxes, my boy. Would you believe it, he had never seen a plane tree in all its majesty? It was the symbol of genius to the Athenians, for their philosophers sat in the shade of the tree when they were in spouting mood. But Xerxes! When he crossed the Hellespont he saw one for the first time. It stopped him dead in his tracks. It must have been like seeing your first Gothic cathedral, or Mount Everest. He fell hopelessly in love with it. The whole damn army of a million odd men came to a dead stop while he paid tribute to this tremendous object. He adorned the tree with all the jewels of his court, taken from the lords and ladies and concubines, loading the branches until they sagged. He declared the tree his wife and mistress, and even said that it was a goddess. It was highly embarrassing for the General Staff. It looked for a while as if the whole campaign would be called off while he sat drooling over this tree. Disaster was, however, very narrowly averted, and he was persuaded to resume the march.
At first sight it may seem somewhat arbitrary to treat the rest of the Cyclades as a central double constellation, and divide them into a northern and a southern group. Anyone who knows them, however, will think the decision justified on the grounds that Tinos, the Lourdes of modern Greece, lies almost cheek to cheek with Delos, the Lourdes of the ancient. The rings of association (pebbles dropped into the well of Greek history) widen according to contrasting yet strictly complementary magnetic fields; one speaks for Apollo and ancient Greece, the other for Byzance and the post-1828 era which brought modern Greece to birth. The result is a truthful and balanced
presentation
of a Greece with several profiles, of an etching in successive stages. If I put the point of my compasses upon the famous monastery of Tinos and describe a circle, I would separate off a group composed of Andros, Mykonos, Delos; and then Syros, Kythnos and Kea â a group sufficiently rich in beauty and
historical
associations to strike the visitor as being the very heart of Greece â the island Greece: the heart of the Greek experience. He will not be wrong. It is here in the brown, wave-washed Cyclades, here or never, that you can absorb and digest this fervent landscape and appreciate the continual intellectual ferment of the people who inhabit it.
The mercuric prototypes made familiar by the old Greek dramatists are still here, in the modern
agora
; they have not stirred in their frames â merchant-bankers, adventurers,
seamen,
shipowners,
négociants
in wine and oil and fruit, peasants,
priests, poets, paupers â the whole
dramatis personae
of the Aristophanic scene. Moreover, each of the islands with its
characteristic
accent and garb is pictured in the modern Greek shadow-play, which is showing signs of a new revival. This great cycle, devoted to the adventures of Karaghiosis, the modern epic hero, is something more than a Punch and Judy show, being full of topicality and political allusion. The new Odysseus, the much diminished hero of the modern world, is a figure rather like the Chaplin tramp, who triumphs over the Turkish overlords by superior cunning. His satyrical turn of speech, however, and his repertoire of jokes are pure Aristophanes in their riskiness and tang. You will surely find this little shadow-play in one of the islands, for it tours there every summer, with a large cast of hand-operated marionettes â Corfiots, Zantiots, Cretans, Viziers, Agas, each presenting a highly accentuated local style â a medallion of place.
Among so many imperatives â for here in the Cyclades the traveller cannot afford to be lazy, for fear of missing a vital experience â it is perhaps best to begin with Mykonos, the most likely tourist landfall, the island which has perhaps suffered the most from its recent over-popularity and the wrong kind of tourist. (âPray, what is the “right” kind of tourist?' I don't know.)
They will tell you on all sides, and with some justification, that Mykonos is finished, crowded out, crushed flat by the feet of the faithful. These people are disgorged in passive droves by the great cruise liners
en route
for Delos, which lies just across the strait, half-an-hour distant. Painfully plodding in Germanic crocodiles, often led by a stout member of a tourist club
holding
aloft a banner, they march off round Delos, like a human sacrifice to a culture which has ceased to identify with its own roots in the past. These pale, muffin faces are hunting eagerly in the past for the lost clues to their present. So much flesh roasted
in this torrid sun, their devoutness is as touching as it is exasperating. Mykonos and Delos reel under their presence, but usually only for a month or two, and not every day.
Whatever tourism has done to the island, Mykonos
must
be seen, cannot be missed out or scamped. It would be like missing out Venice because of the tourists or Fez because of the smell in the
souks
. Of course scale makes nonsense of such a
comparison;
nevertheless, there is nothing quite like this
extraordinary
cubist village, with its flittering, dancing shadows, and its flaring nightmare of whiteness, which haunts its noons and hence your siestas. Its colonnades and curling streets, with their kennel-like houses, sprouting extravagant balconies of tottering painted wood, lead on and on, turning slowly inward upon themselves to form labyrinths, hazing-in all sense of direction until one surrenders to the knowledge that one is irremediably lost in a village hardly bigger than Hampstead.
Everywhere the white arcades and chapels repeat themselves in an obsessive rhythm of originality and congruence; and what is marvellous is that in Mykonos there are no foreign echoes from Venice, Genoa and the rest. Everything is as newly minted as a new-laid Easter egg, and just as beautiful. You can walk for hours in what is an imitation
souk
hung with carpets, brocades, island blankets, donkey bags, shawls in all their bewildering variety. Relentless perspectives of light and shade marry the voluptuous shapes of breasts translated into cupolas and apses, into squinches and dovecots. Take Picasso, Brancusi and Gaudi, knock their heads together, and you might get something like Mykonos by evening light, foundering into
violet
whiteness against a blue-black sea. You forget the Germans, you forget the ladies burned purple, you forget everything and just feast your eyes and mind upon this extravagant bazaar of candescent loveliness. And at the end of every gyre or whorl (you are inside a seashell) you suddenly plunge out upon the
harbour with its welcoming lines of cafés and chop-houses, set out under brilliant awnings or in some places shaded by tall mulberries. Nightfall is the time,
ouzo
-time, after an exhausting day of doing nothing purposefully (the opposite of killing time), when you feel the need of these cafés. The violets, pinks, rose, and grey, of the sinking sun on the walls â just before the wink of the green ray which says goodnight â are all the more haunting for being reproduced in little in the cloudy glass of
ouzo
before you on the table. It is like inhabiting a rainbow.
When darkness comes, the little town becomes even more mysterious and beguiling, whether by electric light or by fizzing gaslight or by the serene yellow glow-worm light of
paraffin-lamps
; the shadows leap and caper on the dancing walls The wind presses on your lips, on your shutters, on your sleeping eyelids; it can rise to a shriek, or sink to a moan like a woman in labour, but it never lets up â always pressing and letting go, pressing and letting go, pressing and releasing your ear-drums. You sleep in a cocoon of wind, and on Delos you hear it whistle like a snake in the burned grass. Its continually changing
pressure
and eternal whispering give you vertigo. Never will you go to sleep so soundly as you will in Mykonos â and it is the deep sleep of early infancy. In the morning, when you push back your shutters, the whiteness comes up to meet you again like the caress of wet eyelashes.
The architecture is of no special time or merit; the Greek islander has built himself a home, that is all, and like a
sea-animal
the shell he constructs prefigures the contours of his nature with its extremes of mysticism and rationalism,
asceticism
and voluptuousness. Walking about this village, which echoes no age or style, you feel that only paradise could be composed like this, so haphazardly and yet so harmoniously. Here plane geometry takes wing and becomes curved of
surface
. The little square boxes of houses are pure, unplanned
expressions of the islanders' inner metric. Everywhere the tiny chapels bud and proliferate like some crazy illustration of
genetic
fission; self-multiplying breasts, fused one upon the other, joined like the separate cloves which go to make a garlic-head or an orange; compartmented upon the same mathematical principle as the pomegranate-fruit which nods its toy crown at you over many a walled garden gate. No, however many tourists come with their chatter and their litter, little Mykonos will not let the stranger down. Its exemplary purity of tone and line will hush them, its island wind alarm their sleep, its black seascape nudge their nerves with the premonition of things as yet unformed and unformulated in their inner natures; perhaps the very things they have come here to experience ⦠It is not cosy, it does not try to charm. It brands you like a hot iron.
I say this advisedly, for as late as October 1976 I visited it with a couple of French friends who had never seen it. I was pale with terror, lest its glamour had been defaced, lest its purity had departed. They were just the people to enjoy and evaluate the momentous experience it had to offer. But then, what the devil? Was I romancing about this place, which I first knew in 1940 when there was not a single hotel there? I am given to rhapsody and exaggeration. Perhaps Mykonos would be a terrible
experience?
I was afraid. But
nothing
had changed and the island was virtually empty. On the cool sea-front at evening we counted half a dozen other tourists like ourselves. It was a miracle. And the new
tavernas
were marvellous, the seafood they served being in the best Athens style, which is saying something when you recall the sea-front
tavernas
below the yacht club in Turkolimano, Piraeus.
Mykonos has so little history to intimidate one that it is a pleasure to get to know that little. Always overshadowed by famous Delos, it is the Cinderella of the islands, even today. There is nothing much to see except the granitic earth, lightly
covered by parched grass which is stirred by the harsh unslaked wind. Apparently the island was used by Poseidon once to
batter
in the skulls of some giants he found irritating. More
interesting
than this was the invasion of the Ionians, for they brought with them the cult of Dionysus, and thenceforth the coinage of the island wore the god's head on one face and a bunch of grapes on the reverse. There is not much more to know, and anyway I supplied my potted biography of this aggravating god of wine in the section on Naxos, where he was rightly regarded as the most interesting man of the season.
As for the three hundred and forty little Orthodox chapels in the capital, they all seem to be private property, belonging to the various families who, at one time or another, had estates in the island. They are all tiny, and seemingly decorated
con furioso
by unbalanced monks with Sicilian backgrounds.
In the violet whiteness of the falling dusk, if you go astray and tumble into one of these chapels you can say a prayer for the goddess of labyrinths who managed to inspire it; and at dawn, when you throw back the shutters to emerge on the balcony of the doll's house you have rented for a night, you will be all the more overcome by the confused yet marvellously homogeneous composition of interpenetrating staircases which rise up at you â some broken off and eclipsed, only to restart again at another level, higher up; some candidly broken off, like the stems of plants. You will delight in the live trees growing right up through the centre of houses which politely give them room, built round them so that washing can be hung out to dry in the branches. (What else is a tree for?) To crown it all is a fantastic display of variegated chimney-pots and weather vanes spinning in the wind, which opens and shuts the palms with a clicking sound as if they were Chinese fans.
Mykonos offers you a sort of prototype of the eye-caressing beauties which will charm you in less selective places â in Poros,
in Paros, or in vine-wreathed Naxos. Everywhere else, history has created a sort of jumble sale of styles which are jolted together and made pleasing simply by paint and whitewash and blue sea; disjunct forms â Venetian mouldings, modern
balconies
, medieval windows, concrete pavements ⦠Not so Mykonos. Here is a true primitive form with its cyclopean
eggplant
style, its bulb chapels; a form decorated not only by
rhapsodic
Hellenistic statues of the classical epoch, but by those primitive ladies with faraway smiles who inhabit the tiny museum on the Acropolis, the wicked Cycladean queens in exile.
If you are a painter or a poet, you will feel, when you walk here at early morning, or late at night, by a full moon, part of the extraordinary natural forces which have shaped a peach, have ensured the exact calibration of a starfish or an orange or an octopus. It seems as if you divine intuitively the function of this vast, desolate, hungry machine we call nature. This is no less true in the terrible but more famous desolation of Delos, where you may stand on a deserted threshing floor with the jackstraw blowing about your ankles and wonder at the effort that human beings have made to try to stamp a reminder of their little significance upon places like these â these nude islands brindled like sand-lions, ravaged now only by wind which moves across the embers of past civilizations, stirring here and there the pathos of an historical echo. There are no
cicadas
here, or few, for
cicadas
like shade and the violin
accompaniment
of running water if possible. But there are occasional wild hares in the hills, brown as their brown soil and big in size, which are good eating, if you can hit one.
Perhaps my somewhat proprietary feelings about Mykonos are due to the fact that I first saw it about 1940, just as the war was really beginning. For a long time we had lived in the
penumbra
of a war declared on all sides but not implemented;
almost a whole year, with the Maginot Line frozen and Greece technically a neutral. But the whole of Europe was breaking up under us, like the raft of Odysseus, and we knew it. It was a matter of time before we would have to swim for it. Already leave-takings were sharper and more poignant because they foreshadowed the more definitive leave-takings the true war would bring. Nobody dared to hope he would survive. It was popularly supposed that German bombing would obliterate in a couple of hours all the capitals of Europe. Thus it was in the twilight of European history that I said goodbye to Henry Miller, who was ordered back to the States by his Consul. I posted off the letter which was afterwards to make a postscript to his
Colossus of Maroussi
, and took ship at night for Mykonos, where I hoped to spend a fortnight of quiet with my wife. At that time, I had begun to understand Greece through the friendships I had made with the young people of Athens, a remarkable body of spirits â some of fortune, some poor â but all endowed with the riches of the buoyant Greek nature. Moreover they were all raised in four languages, and
consequently
the whole of Europe was theirs. Of exceptional
personal
beauty and style, the type to which they belonged was always recognizable on Greek coins or sculptures in the museum. Rich or poor, they could live like nabobs or like tramps without ever losing their taste for life, without ever yielding before adversity. These young men were an education in themselves. It is a pleasure to put down their names â each had something personal to teach me through his attitude to life and his intrinsic Greekness. I think of Andre Nomikos, painter; Stephan Syriotis, high functionary; Matsas, diplomat; Seferis, poet; Elytis, poet; Alexis Ladas, Peter Payne, among so many others. Stephan Syriotis spent his summer hidden in Mykonos with his small boat, living in seclusion almost, and coming back to the little hamlet of Mykonos only for provisions of lentils
and rice and wine. For the rest, he led the life of a seabird, swimming on faraway beaches, reading and sleeping away the days until he needs must return to Athens and his job.
