Mani (14 page)

We crossed the intervening ossuary of hillside and stepped inside the nearest town. The canyons of lane that twisted through the towers were empty and silent as though the inhabitants had fled an aeon ago or a plague had reaped them all in an afternoon. And yet there were signs of recent life: a dozen sacks of dried carob-pods in a courtyard, a child's cart made out of a box and fitted with castors of cotton-reels, a scythe leaning against an iron-studded door. A cat stretched sound asleep along the coping of a wall. Cobbles or slabs of stone alternated with the muffling dust underfoot and tower after tower soared on either hand. The town was empty or locked in catalepsy, paralysed in a spell of sleep which seemed unbreakable. The main square was scarcely larger than a room, and the steep ascending planes of masonry that elbowed it in on all sides lent it the aspect of the bottom of a dried-up well from whose floor sprang a few motionless mulberry trees. The heat and stagnation, the heavy breathlessness of the air and the warm smell of the dust cast a mantle of utter strangeness over this town. It seemed not Greece at all but a dead city of Algeria or Mauretania that a marauding desert tribe had depopulated and abandoned, vanishing into the Sahara or the Atlas mountains three lustres ago. An admonishing silence hung in the air enjoining
the newcomer to walk on tiptoe and laying a finger across his lips.

We soon stopped our vain and sacrilegious tattoo on the shutters of the only shop and settled under a stone loggia in speechless exhaustion. The walls of the little square were whitewashed in a dado several yards high and the worn ledge of a stone seat ran all the way round. Misspelt slogans in lurching black characters across the whitewash cried
Long Live the King!
Another said
long live eternal Greece
, and a third,
Death to all Traitors
. Even the cicadas in this necropolis were silent.

Our torpor was broken at length by the appearance of an old woman in black with a face like a flint. She clicked her tongue in commiseration and padded quickly away, returning with a pitcher and a glass and a plate of prickly pears, saying she had sent her great-granddaughter to rouse the shopkeeper. He arrived, tousled with sleep and repeating, as he unlocked the shutters, that it was a shame we had been made to wait. “In Kitta, too!” he said waving his hand at the towers. “I'm sure it wouldn't happen to me in London....” I had a vision of his solitary and despairing figure in a mysteriously deserted Piccadilly, squatting with arms akimbo on the steps of Eros's statue in a heat wave...

He spread a table under a mulberry tree and loaded it with fried eggs, chopped tomatoes, onions, garlic and some bitter wine and forked lumps of pickled pork dripping in oil out of a heavy jar. (This is called
Syglino
, and though very salt, it is excellent.) Our benefactress had been joined by one of her gossips, another fierce nonagenarian; they sat croaking together, leaning over their sticks on the stone seat under
Death to all Traitors
. There was something baleful about these two black-coiffed figures under the snarl of the slogan: they looked implacable and fate-spinning crones. I remembered that in the old days of the Deep Mani, when their toiling and gun-breeding
days were past, the role of the old Maniot women resolved itself into the three functions of fostering the birth of more and more “guns” among their descendants, instilling them with hatred of their enemies by egging them on to vengeance, and singing dirges for the dead. The
miroloy
being in a way their one means of self-expression, and skill in keening the only way to fame and consideration, the proliferation of guns and the fostering of feuds by exhortations to revenge and the ensuing bloodshed became matters of vital importance, a question of supply and demand; no guns and feuds, no dirges...I felt ashamed of this uncharitable fancy when the second old woman croaked an order to a small descendant and made him milk his goat into a glass, and bring us as a gift the warm and foaming contents....

As the heat subsided, the
rouga
—for that is the name of these little squares in tower-villages (the one in Kitta is further distinguished by the nickname of the Nest)—began to fill with black headkerchiefs and circular hats. The men were the darkest Maniots I had so far encountered. By the time we left, the bench was crowded and the
rouga
, like a room at a party, was covered with standing and operatically interchanging groups, while the towers overhead echoed with the thick dialect of the region. Kitta fell behind us, the towers laying lath-like shadows across the hillside which were broken by boulders and buckled by the fall and upheaval of the ground. It is the ancient Messe “famous for its doves,” once mentioned by Homer as having sent a contingent to swell the host of Agamemnon before Troy. Dusk was gathering as we entered the great stook of towers called Nomia, and the gulfs between them were a-twitter with wheeling bats. A young man from Kitta had befriended us, taking us to dine at his uncle's in the nearby village of Kechriánika, which lay in the middle of a thick wood. Just before the trees swallowed us up, we looked back at the faintly discernible
towers of Kitta and Nomia where lights were beginning to twinkle.

“Nyklianika meri!
” he said in accents of wonder. “Nyklian places!”

After a convivial supper we all lay down to sleep under the little oak trees on soft pallets of brightly-coloured blankets and pillows like stones of destiny. A little owl had settled somewhere near in the branches and its thin cry punctuated the long wail of a klephtic song from the village where someone was leaning back and sending up a scanned baying of the moon.

 

[1]
Much of the imagery of this poem suggests a kinship with Byzantine poems of the Akritic Cycle.

T
HE TIME
has come to sort out my gleanings about the mysterious Nyklians and workings of the blood feud. The former I owe almost entirely to the notes assembled by Mr. Dimitrakos-Messisklis in his fine and little-known book,
[1]
as nobody in the Mani seemed very clear about their origins. The latter—about which they know everything—I owe to conversations with Maniots in a dozen different villages.

In 1295, during one of those civil wars that did much, between the reigns of the Frankish emperors and the Turkish capture of Constantinople, to weaken what was left of the restored Byzantine Empire, Andronicus II Palaeologue sacked Nykli in Arcadia. This town, on the site of which Tripoli now stands, was originally a colony of Spartans from Amoukli. When the Morea was conquered by the Franks, Nykli, owing to its position at a centre of communications, became strategically important and the seat of a powerful barony; and when the Frankish power began to decline, it was largely inhabited by those strange hybrids of Greek and Frankish blood known as “gasmouli.” Sometimes the French language and the Catholic religion prevailed, sometimes Greek and the Orthodox, though the tendency to Hellenism and Orthodoxy increased with time. After the attack of Andronicus, not one stone was left on another, and the Nyklians fled. A number of them (according to
my authority) took the steep but well-worn tracks across the Taygetus to the south of the thinly populated Mani, settling in exactly the regions of which I have just been writing. Their headquarters, in fact, were at Kitta, and the name may have some kinship with the Frankish words
cité
or
città
.
[2]
From them, perhaps (for all here is nebulous), ideas of a feudal hierarchy, modified by the wild ways of the Mani, caught on. When the Mani filled up during the following centuries and struggles for local power were engaged between village and village and family and family,
Nyklian
was the word used to apply to those that came out on top. Before, life in the Mani had been semitroglodytic, uncouth in the extreme, but fairly pacific. Now, families began to fortify themselves behind thick walls and under slab-roofs. Quarrels and feuds for the elbow room of families increased with the thickening population, and the chaos lasted from the fourteenth century until late in the nineteenth. Those that shook themselves out of the ruck, then, were the Nyklians; the subjugated ruck were the
achamnómeroi
, the hinds or villeins. There is something very strange about these centuries of struggle for local dominion over those barren stones; for the grazing rights on the rare blades of grass and possession of the ledges where corn could grow and olive trees take root and for salt-gathering rights along the awful shores. The Nyklians always established themselves on high ground and they alone had the right to roof their houses with slabs of marble. The villeins were forced to inhabit the lower parts of the villages, their thin roofs well within range of the Nyklian towers. These humble helots were forbidden to support their roofs with semi-circular arches like their betters and they were often referred to merely as “the donkeys” by the Nyklians. They were subjected to every kind of contumely and scorn. They were, however, allowed to carry arms, and they would help
their Nyklian overlords in inter-Nyklian strife and piratical expeditions. Some, endowed with an unusual share of valour or cunning, would raise themselves to Nyklian status, and be accepted as such; but, though it was considered no shame for a Nyklian to marry a villein girl, it was a disgrace for a Nyklian girl to marry a villein. It was, in a sense, an open aristocracy, though the sword was the only key. It goes without saying that when, about 1600, the first towers began to change the skyline of Mani villages, they were an exclusively Nyklian prerogative.

As time passed, the power of the Nyklians acquired the pa-tina of continuity, and their pride of race grew. The boast of Spartan origins was stiffened in many cases by claims of imperial or noble Byzantine descent, and, in a few cases, of kinship with the great feudal families of the Franks. With the passage of generations and the branching of offshoot families, clans were formed, and into these, it seems, minor Nyklians and even villein families were welcomed. But, though no records were kept, there was always a consciousness of who were, or were not, kith and kin. Their boasts were again reinforced by feats of arms against the Turks; and, of course, against each other. As the population grew, several Nyklian families would often inhabit the same village, each of them determined to dominate the rest and grasp the kapetanship. To do this they had to be in a position to destroy their competitors' houses by bombarding them from above with boulders and smashing their marble roofs; so the towers began to grow, each in turn, during periods of truce, calling his neighbours' bluff with yet another storey, and so climbing further into the air until they were all perched at the top of fantastic pinnacles. Apart from tactical considerations, the standing of a family was assessed, as it was in San Giminiano and Tarquinia and Bologna, by the height of its towers, with the result that villages thickly populated with Nyklians jut from the limestone like bundles of petrified asparagus.

Something of the same feudal hierarchy prevailed in the Outer Mani, but everything went more smoothly there. Villages and districts accepted one family as their kapetan and usually this heredity went unchallenged. The head of the kapetans was the archikapetano or
bashkapetan
whereas in the Deep Mani, where there were several Nyklians competing in each village for the chieftainship, no permanent
status quo
existed and a family could only maintain its position by force. It was of overriding importance, for a family determined to remain on top, to breed more and more guns. In many cases the immediate struggle of day-to-day warfare was only a symptom of the year-to-year breeding-race; they were often neck-and-neck. Hence the double delight over the birth of a gun, the rejoicing that surrounded a sun-cradle, the sorrow over a moon; in a dozen years each of the guns would be able to grasp a match-lock. In this world of chronic anarchy it is obvious that anyone who hoped to rule over such a people must be strong in towers and guns and wealth and prestige: which conditions held true with all the Beys of the Mani—though the Deep Mani often refused to recognize this omnipotence—but especially true of Zanetbey Grigorakis and truest of all of Petrobey Mavromichalis, Deep Maniot of Deep Maniots, and Nyklian of Nyklians.

Wherever the blood feud reigns, some system of mitigation, some code of rules, is automatically evolved; or life, already a hazardous business, would become unlivable. The Corsicans obey certain unwritten laws. The Sicilians have their
omertà
, the Albanians and the Epirotes the
bessa
system and even the Cretans, who have less inhibitions than any about their
oikogeneiaka
—their “family troubles”—admit a few vetoes and conventions. They have the same purpose as the laws of chivalry in the barbarism of the Dark Ages. The lack of any of these limitations, in spite of certain links with the comparative respectability of the
mafia
, is perhaps the most notable aspect of gang-warfare in large American towns.

Though the Maniots use the Italian word, the vendettas of the Mani were originally a matter of clan or family, not individual, warfare. They were rarely launched, as they are in Crete today, by a slight or an insult to the
philotimo
,
[3]
feminine honour, the forcible abduction of a bride by a party of braves, cattle-rustling or any momentary cause. The killing of one Deep Maniot would certainly have his family up in arms, determined to “get the blood back,” to avenge the dead kinsman by the death, not necessarily of the guilty man but of the pick of the offending family, which was deemed corporately responsible for the crime. But they were usually launched after family conclaves, with a definite object in view, which was no less than the total annihilation of an opposing Nyklian family, the number of whose guns and the height of whose towers offered a challenge to the village hegemony.

In these contests, the first blow was never struck without warning. War was formally declared by the challenging side. The church bells were rung:
We are enemies! Beware!
Then both sides would take to their towers, the war was on, and any means of destroying the other side was fair. The feud would often continue for years, during which it was impossible for either faction to leave their towers by daylight. Water, supplies, powder and shot were smuggled in at night and the gun slits bristled with long barrels which kept up a regular fusillade all day long. If they were in range and lower down, the enemies' roofs would be smashed with flung rocks and sleepers were shot at night by enemies creeping up and firing through chinks in the wall or through windows imprudently left unguarded. Marksmen were sent out on
khosia
, as it is called, to lie in wait for isolated enemies in lonely places—behind rocks, up dark lanes or in the branches of trees—to pick them off, cut them
down with a sword or stab them to death. It was the aim of each side to destroy any member of the other, but it was a double success if they killed a prominent one. Sallies from the towers were sometimes made and gun-fights moved from street to street while the rest of the village remained prudently indoors. The rough jottings of a primitive Deep Maniot surgeon in the eighteenth century show, by the astonishing number of scimitar and yataghan and dagger wounds recorded in his practice, that hand-to-hand battles were very frequent. The same source also proves that women, as gun producers, were not exempt, and their casualties were heavy. A favourite stratagem was the neutralization of the fire-power of an enemy tower in order that a picked band, by a bold rush or by stealth, might pile wood and hay against the base of the tower, soak the fuel with oil and set fire to it in the hope of burning the defenders to death or cutting them down with bullets or yataghans as they ran for it. Sometimes the door itself was blown down with a powder-keg and combustibles and burning brands were pitched into the bottom chamber. In lucky cases the powder magazine would be touched off and the whole tower, with its defenders, blown to bits. A detail that sounds almost incredible but which evidence bears out, is that entire towers were built under fire: the walls facing the zone beaten by the enemy were reared by night, the remainder during the day, with the defenders firing from one side while the masons laid one great limestone cube on another until they had overtopped the enemy.