The Greek Islands (10 page)

The subject is still bedevilled by controversy. I write these lines in an attempt to present a more or less coherent picture of the issues raised by the discovery of Knossos.

An anecdote which is pleasing, beguiling, and perhaps instructive, concerns the marriage of Schliemann, who in
mid-career
suddenly felt the need for a wife by his side. He had nobody particular in mind but, with his heartfelt passion for Greece, felt that the ideal would be a Greek wife. He pondered
the matter, examined all the statues in the museums, and finally announced that he would offer his hand in marriage to the first girl who could recite the
Iliad
entire, without a single fault. He was taking a chance, but the whole of this noble German’s life had been built upon such chances – right from the day when he heard a drunken miller in a grog shop recite some lines of Homer, and felt the strange stirring in the breast which comes only to those who have heard the voice of their vocation speak. Now all Athens was in a ferment, for the Greeks love lotteries, competitions and challenges. The
Iliad
went out of print; everywhere was heard the humming of voices as the girls of Athens started to learn their lines. Many were pipped at the post, many were faulted on a caesura or thrown by a rough breathing, as that queer microdot above an initial vowel is called. The list grew shorter, until at last Schliemann’s future bride appeared on the scene, to recite the whole poem at one go, perhaps even without drawing breath! She was not only word-perfect; she was one of the most beautiful girls in Athens! His luck had held firm.

Though he was getting on in years, Schliemann was regarded as a great catch; his fame was world-wide, and in Greece he had become almost as much an adopted national hero as Byron. It is understandable – he was restoring to the Greeks the true
historic
image of themselves as descendants of the ancients; a role that had been denied them for centuries. Suddenly, here was the truth – the real Agamemnon, so to speak, and not just a
dramatic
figment of the imagination. The wedding struck a
sympathetic
spark in every Greek breast. Schliemann had given the lie to the otiose Professor Fallermayer who, in his celebrated essay, ‘stoutly maintained that the modern inhabitants of Greece have practically no claim to the name of Hellenes, but come of a stock Slavonic in the main, though crossbred with the
offscourings
of many peoples’. According to him the facts of the
case could not be slighted. From the middle of the sixth century onwards, successive hordes of Slavonic invaders swept over Greece, driving the local populations into the more remote corners of the land. Slav supremacy lasted until the end of the tenth century but, already in the middle of the eighth, the great pest of 746 had caused such depredation that the historian Constantine Porphyrogenitus says categorically ‘the whole country had become Slavonic and was occupied by foreigners’. J. C. Lawson, in his admirable essay on the modern folklore and ancient religious beliefs of the Greeks, counter-attacks strongly as follows:

You will find many an echo of this observation in the villages of Crete, even though you are briefly passing through; and if you have the time and patience to attend a Greek wedding or a Greek funeral with its terrifying keening, you will have no doubt that these people are the descendants of the ancients who have kept their ethos and their spiritual salt intact because of the purity and intricacy of their native tongue.

Even if your time is limited, if you use it properly, the impressions you gather should fall into place and permit you to see beyond the tragic ‘modernization’ of the towns with its ugliness. A traveller of modest means and limited to a few days in the island should go to Heracleion and find a modest perch
in a small hotel. He will find that Knossos is a longish walk, but five miles or so is nothing if one is curious to gather one’s own impressions. There is of course a bus, nowadays there are taxis galore. The distance of Phaestos need not daunt him either, for there is an early-morning bus there from Heracleion and a
late-evening
bus back. It is about twenty miles away on the southern shoulder, but it has the added attraction that the journey there will make you pass through a magnificent section of the Cretan countryside. Of the two sites it is, for me, the most evocative in its brooding stillness, in the light airs from the sea which cradle it, and from the shadows of high cloud which roll across it. It is uncomfortably full of suggestive mysteries, which produce a feeling that the guide book with its careful, factual approach does not suggest. To camp out here in a fierce thunderstorm, and to awake frozen in a dense dew which has condensed on your blankets like a sheet of mercury is the sort of experience which every camper will relish, but the swift tinges of
rheumatism
that follow from damp clothes is no joke. By the road among the olives, a peasant has lit a fire with olive trimmings; he jovially welcomes you and helps dry your kit, plying you the while with gasps of
tsikudi
and slabs of brown crust. When you are ready to set off you offer him money; he looks shocked and aggrieved, and puts your hand away as if it held a sword. The quiet ruins rest on your tired shoulder-blades as you march in the deep dust – you feel the weight of a message from the past which you have not been able to decipher. The experience is dense and exciting, but you would be at a loss to say why or in what manner. Phaestos! It is one of those places which mark you.

To revert for a moment to the vexing question of the
labyrinth
, it is important to make a distinction between a
man-made
maze and a labyrinth constructed by nature; and the natural geological labyrinth situated near Gortyna has for long
been a candidate for the honour of being the original lair of the Minotaur. Sceptics have declared that it is simply an
abandoned
quarry with a few corridors but, while I have not
completely
explored it myself – for lack of an Ariadne and a ball of thread – I think it is more suggestive than that.

The most succinct and accurate description of this singular geological formation comes from the pen of that energetic and endearing Victorian divine, the Reverend Tozer, whose detailed, factual travel books enjoyed a great appeal during the last century. He says:

I can vouch for the accuracy of his description and also for the fact that the place is known as ‘The Labyrinth’ in the local speech. To the best of my knowledge the whole of it has never been explored, though the villagers thereabouts claim that
the internal network of corridors spans an area of some ten square kilometres. One must, as always, subtract a bit of
peasant
exaggeration, but nevertheless the place is impressive – in places like a series of small cathedrals – and so well ventilated that I am not sure one could not trace the corridors with smoke, which always follows the direction of the air. Once again, however, there is disagreement among scholars about the true history of the place. Of course the whole surface of these volcanic islands from Sicily to Cyprus is simply a cap of
metamorphic
limestone, punctured everywhere by successive
volcanic
explosions, and pock-marked like an old piecrust. It is not the only cave system in a Greek island – I know of a dozen. But there seems to be nothing of the same size, in such tantalizing juxtaposition with a historic reference – nor anything as worthy as a Minotaur’s haunt. (The limestone crust over most Greek islands certainly accounts for the way that sound carries over great distances; the whole place is like a drum, responsive to every snatch of noise.)

It would be an exciting thing to explore this Gortyna
labyrinth
with professional care; perhaps by the time these lines are printed the Speleologists’ Club of Athens will have done so and printed their findings.

One last brief thought before leaving the ancient history of the island with all its conundrums – a thought devoted to the scripts. Here again one wishes that the whole subject had been fully explored, and the findings clearly tabulated. Alas! Despite all the great enthusiasm for the Michael Ventris ‘breakthrough’ into an interpretation of the script called Linear B, opinions seem still to be divided as to its veracity.

Nothing could better illustrate the sharp division of thinking about the history of Minoan Crete than the fact that the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
carries two articles concerned with it, one of which clearly accepts the authenticity of Ventris’s
discovery, while the second seems to cast doubts upon it. The ordinary reader or visitor will not pay much attention to these learned differences. But if Ventris is right, it is most exciting to find, among the deciphered words, ones which are in daily use in any Greek village today (
toson
meaning ‘so much’;
kreesos
meaning ‘gold’;
eruthros
meaning ‘red’;
selinon
meaning ‘celery’). There are also some proper names which strike a chord – Theseus, Hector, Alexandra and Theodora. Myself, I hope that Ventris is correct though I have not the scholarship to assert that he is.

The earliest seals, tags or tallies, with their pictographic signs, hinted at an Egyptian influence. Linear A and Linear B came later, and are thus probably more sophisticated. While A remains undeciphered, the brilliant suggestions of Ventris gave great hopes for a decoding of Linear B, and some progress was made along the lines of his suggestions. The real
disappointment
has nothing to do with the accuracy or the errors of his interpretation – it is that what has so far been decoded is
relatively
uninteresting. We have so to speak tumbled into a Minoan stockroom, among registers which tabulate the stock held in these depots. No poems, alas, or proclamations, or religious documents, which might give us a clue as to how these far-off people thought or felt about the universe.

If history is eloquent though mute, the poets themselves are far from mute, and the Cretan poet deserves to be heard on his native soil. Here is one whose name is now world-famous. ‘This Cretan landscape seemed to him like good prose;
well-fashioned
, economical, shorn of excessive riches, powerful and controlled … It said what it had to say with manly austerity. But between its austere lines you could discern an unexpected sensitivity and tenderness – the lemons and oranges smelt sweet in sheltered hollows, and beyond, from the boundless sea, came an endless stream of poetry.’ The writer is Kazanzakis,
perhaps the most representative Cretan mind of today,
expressing
strange yearnings for mystical revelation, and a stranger belief in the heroic future of man. There are few Cretan writers or artists who have done work of European stature. This is not the fault of the Cretan soul and mind, which is both poetical and productive; it is the fault of the history that has torn up the land, annihilated the populations, driven the clans into hiding. There has been no peace, in which the arts of leisure and
introspection
could flourish; it is hard to be an artist with a loaded pistol in one hand. Nevertheless, whenever chance offered the Cretans a breather, they took it, and men like Kazanzakis and Prevelakis, though they spent much of their maturity abroad in Athens and elsewhere, remained obstinately Cretan-souled to the end. It is doubtful whether someone who is not an ardent Philhellene will find much literature to read about Crete, except the really great book
Zorba
, which is a marvellous evocation of a landscape, and a sketch of a temperament as validly Greek as that of Odysseus himself. It is a captivating book, which should be read in the island if possible or immediately after returning home.

There are other good books about the island, but they are mostly by foreigners. The home-grown article is good in quality but, apart from one very big novel by Prevelakis, there is not much of it. The average reader or traveller will probably not surmount the longueurs of the national poem,
The Erotokritos
, though he will, if he dips, find much to admire in it. Nor does it seem strange that this is a poem of courtly love, which might have been made in Toulouse by French troubadours. The heroic style is Cretan
par excellence
, and the village poets, often blind, wandering bards, have carried it all over the island with them – and far afield, selling the texts of their songs and recitations in little chap-books printed in other corners of Greece. They sing of courtly virtue –
levendia
, which is simply the modern word
for Homer’s
arete
. And the feminine version of the word describes the virtue of a girl not only supremely beautiful but valiant and heroic – a real mate fit for a
levendis
. It is a beautiful word –
levendissa
– and when a Greek wants to compliment you on your wife or your sister, or express a genuine and profound admiration for the noble stamp of her mind, he will use the word. Without girls of this heroic mould it is doubtful whether Crete, or for that matter Greece itself, would have kept on
constantly
renewing its poetic image, and in the long wars and insurrections there are as many women heroes as there are men – whose exploits were no less dazzling than those of their men.