On the Shores of the Mediterranean (19 page)

The following year, 1788, with what was a by-now-greatly-enlarged robber band, which he had enlisted for the purpose, thus depriving these regions of their own autonomous robber bands, he took Ioannina, thereafter, as its Vizier, conferring on it, and all the other regions of which he was the overlord, a degree of law-abiding stability that had been rare up to this time, and which found great favour with his masters at Constantinople.

In about 1790 he began the first of his campaigns against the Suliots, the results of which we have already seen, and in 1797, after the collapse of the Venetian Republic, which Napoleon had brought about, he succeeded in persuading him to send a number of French military engineers to oversee the fortification of his capital. He was less successful in his attempt to persuade Napoleon to let him have Parga and Préveza, which by this time were garrisoned by French troops, but when the news arrived of Napoleon’s débâcle in Egypt Ali Pasha had the audacity to attack Préveza, forcing the French garrison to surrender and making it his principal port.

It was at about this time, having characteristically waited the best part of forty years for a congenial opportunity to present itself, that he revenged himself on those who had allegedly so ill-used his mother and sister by locking the entire population of Gardiki, a town in the Pindus range, in a monastery, then having them butchered by 400 of his Albanian guards, reserving a more lingering fate for the two principal protagonists, one of whom he had spitted and then roasted alive over a fire, the other flayed alive and then minced.

In 1807 he had hopes that Napoleon might have obtained Parga for him at the Peace of Tilsit, but not unnaturally the Emperor did not exert himself on his behalf and Parga remained French until 1814, when it was given to the British who, rather disgracefully, handed it over to the Sultan Mahmud II, which meant that
it fell into the hands of Ali Pasha, who was now master of all Albania, Epirus and parts of Thessaly in eastern central Greece, while his son, Mouktar Pasha, was appointed ruler of the Morea, the Peloponnese.

In November 1809, Byron arrived at Ioannina, hoping to find this prodigious ruler, whose notoriety if not fame had by now spread far and wide, in residence, only to be told that the Vizier was away besieging the castle of Berat, north of Tepelenë, but had left instructions that a house was to be put at the English lord’s disposal and that all his wishes were to be gratified. After riding out into the city and visiting the splendid palaces of Ali and his grandsons, which Byron found too ornamented for his taste, he set off on a nine-day journey on horseback to Tepelenë. The following day Ali Pasha appeared, and Byron’s description of him is more or less as his pictures show him at this stage of his life, when he was about sixty years old: very short, very fat, with a full white beard and with an imperious eye. The meeting was a great success. Ali Pasha detected signs of good breeding in the smallness of the poet’s ears and hands, which were also of an acceptable degree of whiteness. While Byron was there, as he wrote to his mother from Préveza, Ali Pasha looked on him as his son, and treated him as a child, sending him sweetmeats, but also begging him to visit him and smoke a pipe with him at night, when he had more leisure for entertaining his noble guest.

In 1800 the Vizier became enamoured of a Mme Frossini, the wife of an important merchant of Ioannina, who was already carrying on an affair with Ali’s son, Mouktar Pasha, while her husband was away on one of his frequent business trips. She had been brought to Ali’s notice by Mouktar’s wife, who had not taken kindly to seeing her own jewellery being lavished on Mme Frossini by her husband.

When Ali set eyes on his son’s mistress he was so enamoured
of her that he immediately sent his son away on a campaign and then asked her to transfer her affections to himself. When she refused, he accused her of being a spy and had her drowned from a boat in the Lake of Ioannina, together with seventeen other ladies of what was alleged to be easy virtue who had been chosen to keep her company.

Four years later, in 1805, Ali Pasha became enamoured of a Mme Vassiliki and, after having his own wife put to death, he made her his mistress. She was a more serious lady who belonged to a secret society which was working for the independence of Greece and, as a Christian, she was to be instrumental in saving the lives of many of Ali Pasha’s Christian subjects, who up to this time had often been in some danger of losing their lives simply because they were Christians. Thanks to Mme Vassiliki, from this time onward his reputation in this particular field showed a marked improvement.

For the next fifteen years he enjoyed unbridled power, but in 1820, when he was seventy-six years of age, he was unwise enough to have one of his ex-officials, who had moved to Constantinople, murdered there while in the service of Sultan Mahmud II. In July 1820, the Sultan declared Ali Pasha to be a rebel and a traitor, and the Pashas of Turkey-in-Europe were ordered to close in on him with their forces. None were happier than the Suliots, some of whom had returned to the mainland from Corfu and now saw an opportunity to take revenge on the author of their misfortunes.

The following year saw him closely besieged in Ioannina, with not only his officers deserting him to take service with the forces of the Sultan but also his own sons. Meanwhile, the Turkish fleet had taken his principal port, Préveza, and was now blockading the entire coast of Epirus.

By this time, partly because these events were engaging the
attention of the Turks, the Greeks had commenced their War of Independence, so it was now doubly necessary for the Turks to bring the siege to a rapid conclusion.

The siege was commanded by Khourschid Pasha and lasted fifteen months. The operations of the attackers were limited by the fact that the Vizier had immured himself on an upper floor of his citadel, together with his harem, having packed the ground floor with sufficient barrels of gunpowder to blow up the citadel and a large part of the city if the faithful retainer he had installed there obeyed his instructions to light the fuses and detonate them, should what looked like becoming a successful attack take place.

Under the pretence of offering him a free pardon from the Sultan, Khourschid, who seems to have been every bit as guileful as his opponent, told him that he should leave the citadel and cross to the monastery of Panteleimon, on the island in the lake, there to await the arrival of the document. This Ali Pasha rather surprisingly agreed to do; but when Khourschid returned, it was with a warrant for his execution, and in an exchange of fire – the bullet holes can be seen to this day – the brave old ruffian was killed.

Meanwhile the faithful guardian still waited in the citadel with a smouldering match for his master’s order to touch off the gunpowder, which could only be countermanded by sending him a broken ring, which was now delivered to him.

As soon as he was dead Ali Pasha was decapitated and his head, suitably embalmed, was placed on a silver salver, tastefully wrapped in red silk tissue, and then displayed to the populace of the city, who apparently were greatly cheered by this spectacle, before being sent to the Sultan in Constantinople as a proof that he was finally dead.

Mme Vassiliki was more fortunate, or rather she was cleverer, or more cunning. It was she who betrayed the secret of the broken ring to Khourschid Pasha, or one of his officers, having prudently
taken shelter in another cell. Carried to Constantinople, a prisoner with the remainder of Ali Pasha’s harem, she was spared by Sultan Mahmud who, rather unfairly, perhaps because they were Muslims and therefore less than the dust, had all the others hanged. She died in Greece, poor and forgotten, but not necessarily any more unhappy than when she had catered for the needs of the Vizier, in 1835.

At a pleasant café shaded by plane trees on the shores of the lake, we talked to a waiter who had emigrated to Australia a few years previously with his wife and children, had grown tired of it, returned to his birthplace and was now, once again, planning to re-emigrate. ‘I came back here to Ioannina with the equivalent of £20,000 [$28,000] in Australian dollars,’ he said. ‘That was two years ago. Since then we have consumed a large part of it. I was a croupier in a casino in Sydney. It was a fine job. In four minutes, working in the casino as a croupier, I could earn the price of a bottle of the retsina you are now drinking in this café which, as you know, is much more expensive than if you buy it in a shop. Here, working in this restaurant, it takes me thirty minutes to earn the same amount of money. Now we are going back to Sydney before we are left with no money at all, and I shall be a croupier again and my wife will once more be happy. But I shall not be happy.’

We left him among the empty tables, a small, sad figure who hated Sydney, hated Australia, loved his native city Ioannina but couldn’t afford to live in it, the familiar dilemma of those born and bred in the Mediterranean lands.

Reluctantly leaving Ioannina, passing the cave in which in 1611 Dionisos Skylosophos, Bishop of Trikkala, was skinned alive for leading a revolt against the Turks, we took what, when all this wild region was part of the Turkish Empire in Europe, was the road to Constantinople.
¹

After skirting the north shore of Lake Pambotis, the road climbed above it along the flanks of Mount Mitsikeli, from which, looking back, there was a magnificent view of the city and of its promontory and the island on which Ali Pasha came to a sticky end, on which there is now a taverna famous for eels and crayfish.
Then, at the Mázia Pass, another panorama opened up, this one of the great forests and peaks of the Pindus range and, far below, of the upper waters of the Arachthes River, which flows into the Gulf of Arta, to which the road now descended.

From the valley of the Arachthes the road climbed up through a wilderness of sandstone in the Pindus range, with Peristeri, a 7500-foot peak, looming out of the forests to the south of it, high above one of its tributaries which, like so many of the rivers of Epirus, flowing to the Ionian Sea, has its source near the village of Métsovo. This was a long, rambling, very pleasant village on a mountainside covered with beech, box and ilex trees and divided into two parts, the ‘Prosilio’ (facing the sun) and the ‘Anilio’ (away from the sun), by the enormous chasm of the Metsovitikos River, one of the rivers of the Pindus that have their sources here. Its inhabitants are Vlachs (Vlakhi or Vlakhiots), Christians of Wallachian origin, who took refuge in this wild region during the Turkish occupation. They used to travel as far afield as Hungary, Russia and Germany to work as labourers and artisans. They were also and still are principally itinerant shepherds, making the transhumance with their flocks from the plains of Thessaly in summer to the High Pindus.

Some became millionaires. One, Giorgios Averoff, emigrated to Egypt where he became a merchant, accumulated a vast fortune and built hospitals and schools in Alexandria, Athens and his native village. He also provided the Greek government with the wherewithal, about £300,000 ($420,000), to buy a second-hand Italian armoured cruiser, which originally cost £950,000 or $1,330,000 to build, which was named after him. Such a man, who benefits Greece and the Greeks, is known to his compatriots as an ‘Evergheti’.

Now in the 1980s the descendants of this egregious band of shepherds, labourers, artisans, millionaires and destroyers of Turks
and robbers, were to be seen sitting under one of the enormous plane trees in the little square from which the main street stretched away uphill flanked by picturesque buildings housing little shops selling wooden artefacts, embroidered textiles and good hand-woven carpets, imbibing the wine-like air, amiable, dignified, old and not-so-old – some of them in their mid twenties – most of them moustached, all wearing the uniform of the Vlachs of Métsovo: black pill-box hats, short black homespun jackets, black and white homespun breeches, pleated linen shirts and shoes with black pom-poms on them. Lively-looking heirs to another age, they gave the impression that they only needed a word from some chief among them to bring out their weapons from wherever they had cached them and take up their positions with their full-skirted womenfolk on the mountainside, ready to consign the Muslim infidel to perdition.

We were about to leave this place, though we had a strong disposition to linger indefinitely, feeling perhaps mistakenly that in spite of its inhabitants having come to terms with tourism to the extent that they admitted its existence, they had not allowed their ancient pattern of life to be even slightly disturbed by it, when, as if to prove this contention, one of the younger men rose to his feet, greeted us warmly and insisted on taking us to a taverna for a drink.

From Métsovo we climbed through forests of beech and pine, some of them immense trees, to the Katára Pass, on the way seeing muleteers unloading timber from their animals at the roadside and in the meadows hooded shepherds, for it was suddenly cold here, watching their sheep and goats.

Here, 5600 feet up at the Pass, from where the snow-clad mountains of the Pindus could be seen rising behind Métsovo, the weather changed. As if by magic huge masses of black, swirling cloud appeared overhead and it began to rain, at first heavily, then
torrentially. It was only surprising that it did not fall in the form of snow, the Pass being frequently snowbound between October and May.

Now we left Epirus for what in summer can usually be described as the sun-baked plains of Thessaly, descending towards them – they were still a long way off – by a road full of hairpin bends with the rain clouting down. At first it ran through the same sort of beech and pine forests we had climbed through to the Pass, then amongst holm oaks and finally through a region of scrub and red earth which had turned to liquid mud, all the water running not to the Ionian Sea as it had previously, but, now that we had crossed the watershed, to the Aegean. In what was now the last of the light we started looking anxiously for a place where we could camp for the night with a sufficiently solid foundation for the vehicle. At the same time we wanted to be out of sight, not that there would be many evil-doers about on such a night in this, still one of the loneliest and wildest parts of mainland Greece, still in the High Pindus, the abode of the brown bear, wolves, wild boar, lynx, Egyptian and griffon vultures and even the golden eagle.

Eventually, by which time it was pitch dark as well as pouring, we found just such a place by a lonely crossroads.

There, inhabited by one poor, bedraggled, lonely donkey, who was tethered to a stake outside it and roaring away as donkeys do when they feel themselves lonely and abandoned, we found the concrete shell of what promised to be a pretty hideous building. In it Wanda cooked delicious lamb chops, bought in a butcher’s shop in Métsovo, by the light of a pressure lantern, while the donkey, bribed with sugar to stop making such an appalling noise, happily munched away at our mattresses, unseen in the darkness. Here, with a sufficiency of red wine that had not been mucked about with, we experienced what for travellers are
those only too rare moments of peace and contentment when they actually succeed in finding a good place in which to pass the night.

In fact it was not all that good. The only place on such a night was either indoors, or with one’s van under cover. The rain that was hissing down soothingly enough while we were eating and drinking our dinner also drummed with incredible violence on the roof of our van, making sleep impossible; to this were added the dreadful noises made by the donkey who, having experienced the pleasures of sugar for what was certainly the first time in his life, was drawing attention to the fact that he wished to continue with the treatment.

The rain ceased at dawn, by which time the donkey had fallen into a sort of semi-coma, and when we emerged stiffly from the van it was to find ourselves in a grey, dripping world, looking down into a valley the upper slopes of which were covered with squalid-looking tin huts housing sheep and goats, the modern equivalent of bothies, up to which their owners were already climbing from a village that lay below them half hidden in mist.

Of all the strange, exotic and outlandish sights to be seen in any of the lands bordering on the Mediterranean few have created a greater impression on travellers than the astonishing rock formations of various shapes and sizes that soar into the air in closely massed clumps above the valley of the River Peneus near the place where it emerges into the Thessalian Plain from the gorges of the Pindus in what is still the territory of the Vlachs.

The majority of these columns, pilasters, stalagmites, giant mushrooms, needles, pinnacles, islands, spikes, cylinders, drums, stacks, obelisks and tusks, which are just a few of the similes that have been attributed to them, were made more remarkable by the fact that the largest number of them, and the most inaccessible,
had monasteries built on them, to which there was no access except by rope, drawbridge or ladder and, in the earliest times, by scaffolding pegged to the rock.

‘Twelve sheets would not contain all the wonders of Meteora, nor convey to you an idea of the surprise and pleasure which I felt in beholding these curious monasteries planted like eagles’ nests, on the summits of high and pointed rocks,’ wrote the architect, traveller and explorer of remote and wild places, Charles Robert Cockerell, on a journey which off and on kept him in the Mediterranean lands for seven years, in the course of which, among other notable works of ancient art, he discovered the reliefs forming the frieze of the temple of Apollo in Arcadia, which was bought by the British Government and now forms one of the more spectacular adornments of the British Museum.

The best description of the Meteora is that of Robert Curzon, later 14th Baron de la Zouche, who travelled extensively in Egypt, the Holy Land, Albania and Greece in the years from 1833 to 1837. In his book
Visits to the Monasteries of the Levant
, one of the classics of Near Eastern travel, he gives an amusing account of visiting these and other monasteries in search of manuscripts. Curzon had travelled from Ioannina to Meteora in 1834 by the same route that Edward Lear followed fifteen years later and the one that we had also followed (scarcely a coincidence as that was and is the only route to it from Ioannina).

At that time the region had been so infested with
klephti
, robbers, that Curzon had been constrained to furnish himself with a
firman
signed by the then Vizier of Ioannina, Mahmud Pasha, which would, he hoped, act as a safe conduct and also enable him to obtain an escort if he wished to do so. The law of the Vizier in fact scarcely extended as far as Métsovo, as Curzon discovered when he reached it and found himself provided with a so-called escort by the headman of the village. They instantly conducted
him to a lonely spot where they began to rob him and it was only by exercising great presence of mind that he was able to persuade them to conduct him to the lair of the band of which they were members and of which the headman of Métsovo was in fact the chief, where he eventually persuaded the second-in-command to provide him with five of his Wallachian ruffians to accompany him on his way.

Even today it is still possible to understand the fascination that the Monasteries of the Air exerted on these and much later travellers, although for the most part visitors, since the 1920s and 30s, have no longer been swung aloft in nets, steps having been cut in the rock. Only supplies are still taken into some of the remaining monasteries by this method.

From the moment the visitor stood at the foot of one or other of the great pinnacles looking up at one of the seven monasteries (there are now only six) from amongst the lush jungle of vegetation that grew at the foot of them, and saw these buildings, some of them literally cantilevered out over the void in the hair-raising, and one suspects not always necessary fashion beloved by the builders of Orthodox monasteries on cliffs and rocks everywhere, and sometimes hearing the sound of bells tolling hundreds of feet overhead, he knew that he was about to enter a strange and different world.

There was a ritual attached to visiting a monastery in the Meteora. To attract the attention of the monks it was customary to fire a gun, the equivalent, as Curzon remarked, of knocking on the front door in less dangerous parts. Then, if the party looked more or less acceptable from such a height, which in the case of Curzon’s party was at first in doubt as it included the ruffians he had been given to escort him to Meteora from the robbers’ lair, a thin cord would be let down to which the visitor, very much in the role of a suppliant, could attach, that is if he had any, whatever
credentials or letters of recommendation he had had the foresight to provide himself with. They were then whisked aloft where they were subjected to a searching and sometimes protracted scrutiny by the Agoumenos, the Abbot, or whoever was in charge at that particular moment who could read.

If it was then agreed that the visitor should be admitted a net was lowered, hooked to a rope which was invariably very old, monks living on rock pinnacles being necessarily of a frugal nature, and if it was agreed that he could stay the night, sufficient of his personal entourage to cater for his bodily comfort but not enough to take the monastery by force, two usually were deemed enough, were windlassed aloft, unarmed, in the net by ten to a dozen monks, which might be almost the entire complement of the monastery, heaving away on the capstan bars, with the net spinning like a top, wearing out the rope even more than it was already, as it rose with infinite slowness into the air, an operation that at Barlaam for instance, which was 222 feet above the embarkation point at the base of the rock, entailed winding up 37 fathoms of rope and could take anything up to half an hour.

If the visitor, as was the case with Curzon, was reluctant to entrust his life to this device, there was sometimes the alternative, which existed at Barlaam, of climbing a series of rickety wooden ladders, which were attached to the vertical rock face by wooden pegs, some of which had broken loose from the cliff at their lower ends, so that the ladders hung away from it over the void, making the transfer from one set of ladders to the next extremely hazardous, an alternative to the net so horrible that very few were bold enough to attempt it, or if they did, refused to descend by the same means. Even Curzon elected to leave Barlaam in the net.

Once he had been drawn into the monastery by the monks, in whom simplicity sometimes bordering on gormlessness, stubbornness and lack of any kind of aesthetic feeling seemed equally
compounded, he found himself in a community which had been functioning in much the same way ever since a hermit, named Barnabas, founded what was called the
Skete
of the Holy Ghost between AD 950 and 970, a
skete
being a small monastery. Previous to this presumed foundation the hermits had lived in holes in the rock faces, some of which can be seen to this day with wooden platforms in the mouths of them on which the hermits could take the air, reached by crazy wooden ladders. Some of these pigeon holes in the rock were later used as places of banishment for recalcitrant monks.