The Greek Islands (3 page)

Everything absurd, everything tragic, and everything gay seems to have happened here. The place has been a dowry for
kings and queens. Richard Coeur de Lion passed this way. Napoleon planned to run a frigate aground on the fort and attack from the rigging. (Lucky he didn’t – the plan is madly impractical.) Byron, Trelawny, and the Greek Liberation
Committee
brought their squabbles here and were met by
arch-eccentrics
like Lord North, dressed in a
chlamys
and crowned with laurel. Solomos (the first great poet of free Greece), the author of the national anthem, was received with acclaim by the British when they ruled Corfu in their graceless and rather bluff fashion. (They made up for their manners by ennobling everyone and marrying the prettiest and most talented girls.)

When the French, in their spiteful fashion, burned the
Venetian
Golden Book in which the names of the great Venetian families were inscribed, the aristocracy did not die – as it was intended to; it was in fact reborn phoenix-like in titles stiff and unreal as old brocade. They live on, these beautiful titles, even today.

Of the troubles and exactions of Venetian rule we know little, but the island as a whole prospered under Venice. Why? The Venetians gave ten gold pieces for every grove of a hundred olive trees planted. When they in their turn fell asleep and left, Corfu possessed nearly three million trees. They are still her pride and her dowry. Not to mention the income derived from an oil as famous now as that of Delphi. It is indeed due to the Venetians that Corfu strikes the casual visitor as being one vast olive forest – it is. Edward Lear, who spent some years in the island – and wrote some of his funniest letters from here – was quite haunted by the olive groves, as witness his marvellously buoyant engravings of the various sites. When the north wind comes drumming down, this whole Prosperine extent of trees shivers and turns silver. In contrast to most other olives these have never been pruned, and they climb to unusual heights. Some are said to be six hundred years old. The Venetians were a
long time here (1386 to 1797) so there was plenty of time to carry out an extensive re-afforestation. The peasantry not only got a bounty for planting but could pay their taxes in oil. In the late 1960s a census of the trees was taken which showed that Corfu alone had 3,100,000 trees.

The ideal subtropical climate is another factor which favours the olive; its rather delicate flowering is seldom disturbed in spring. Despite the abundant winter rainfall, the highest in Greece (1300 mm) a year, there is comparatively little or no snowfall. On the other hand the Albanian mountains which girdle the landward coast are snow-capped all winter, so that the island, despite its Tibetan-looking foreground, enjoys mildness and becomes a veritable sun trap.

In classical times, Corfu and the opposite mainland were famous for their flourishing oak trees (remember that Dodona is only 130 kilometres east); but this is no longer the case. The uplands on both sides of the straits are bare and rocky; they have been stripped. In Corfu itself, what the Venetians gave with one hand they took back with the other – their shipyards in Govino Bay were once extensive; now only a few ruins remain. On the Epirote Hills, the damage was mostly due to the Napoleonic wars. Both British and French Governments bought great quantities of wood from Ali Pacha in order to fit out their fleets. When you think that at least two thousand oaks (not counting other trees) were needed to build one ship of the line … Whole forests were swallowed up in this way.

But there is little point in reciting the long bead-roll of
visitors
and those who called here because they were
en route
for somewhere else and found the island on their way; Nero,
heading
for the Isthmian Games, at which he was to bestow all the first prizes upon himself, and end by ordering the Isthmus of Corinth to be dug, is a case in point.

It would be fair to consider his case as an early form of
islomania. His concern with the Corinth canal was neither aesthetic nor utilitarian – he simply had a fancy to turn the Peloponnesus into an island. It would be more to the point to speak of Tiberius, that specialist in choice holiday places, who actually made a villa at Cassiopi upon the rocky northern point. Strangely enough, he did the same in Rhodes on a similar point with roughly the same exposure: a headland over the water, situated in a gulf crowned with tall mountains. Cato, Pompey, Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra … to the devil with the lot of them! In a later epoch came a visitation which aroused many an echo – The Duse and D’Annunzio chose the island as a place in which to consummate a somewhat stagey love affair. The villa is still pointed out. Noël Coward was devoured there by a flea, or so he told me.

The first sea battle in the history of ancient Greece took place between the Corinthians who had settled Corfu and the Corfiots themselves. The latter won; but it was like the closing bars of an overture which ushers in the long senseless chain of invasions and attacks, plagues and famines which have followed right up to this day. At the outbreak of the last war the Italians used the island for target practice and did the town a great deal of damage; but the saint reacted in characteristic fashion, and it is said that during the greatest raid the citizens of the town (or as many as could) huddled into the church and escaped unscathed, for it was almost the only public building to escape a hit. For a long time Spiridion had not done very much except make routine cures for epilepsy or religious doubts. But this was a return to full form, and it once again reminded the people of Corfu that this same old saint had once dispersed fleets, riding upon the afternoon mistral to do so, and even repulsed the plague more than once – it whisked off with a shriek in the form of a black cat. Perhaps it is really due to him that the merciful sleep of nescience descends on all who come here?
The fact remains that even the Turks when they landed 30,000 troops and ravaged the island in 1537 felt something equivocal in the air which made them nod. They too retired after a while, though they took 15,000 islanders with them as slaves.

The Ionian Islands were, even in modern times, a bone of contention between the great powers. By the Treaty of Tilsit the French were authorized to assume their jurisdiction. They stayed from 1808 to 1814, outfacing the severe British blockade. Indeed they only left after the Treaty of Paris was signed which placed the islands under the jurisdiction of Britain. The British suzerainty was ended only in 1864, when Britain ceded the islands to the newly born Greek kingdom.

The British occupation, which lasted for so long, yielded a rich harvest of memoirs and official dispatches, and a richer gallery of notable eccentrics and famous figures like Gladstone whose infectious Philhellenism was not echoed a century later when the Cyprus issue raised its head. More’s the pity. There is no place in the world where the English are more enjoyed and admired than on the island of Prospero.

As for what they left behind, the cricket comes upon one as rather a shock – the noble sweep of the main Esplanade with its tall calm trees is suddenly transformed into an English cricket field, though the pitch is one of coconut-matting. Under the charmed and astonished eye of the visitor a marquee is run up and two teams dressed in white take possession of the ground. It is highly professional and would do justice to Lord’s.

What is singular is the deep and pensive appreciation of the game in an audience very largely consisting of Greek peasants who have never had the chance to play it. They have
presumably
come in to town to shop from some nearby village, and now here they are, apparently deeply engrossed in this foreign game while their fidgeting mules are tied to trees on the
Esplanade
. The audience for the match, apart from them, consists of
young soldiers from the garrison, tourists, waiters, an
occasional
bank-clerk playing hookey, a dawdling postman. On all their dark, intent faces you see a deep concern, a quiet appraisal and appreciation of the game in progress; its white ritual, and its measured cadences seem to sit well with a Mediterranean rhythm. Moreover, they applaud in the right places, and catch their breaths at any notable stroke with authentic delight.
Perhaps
, in all their dark intentness, what they really see is
something
like the white-clad figures racing upon some Minoan vase-painting to soar over a rearing bull. There is a tie between sport and ritual, for one must have grown out of the other.

From almost everywhere in the town one can hear the characteristic click-clock of the ball on the bat, and the rounds of applause. Once upon a time it was mingled with the stately popping of ginger-beer bottles, which as ritual objects, together with drop scones, lingered on in the coloured marquee until about 1937–8. But cricket is not yet just a dead ritual; it is still flourishing among the children of Corfu, for everywhere in town you will find the chalked up practice-wicket on the walls of the houses, for all the world as if one were in the East End of London.

Yet, after your first adventure with the Greek light and your initial rapture at the beauty of the landscape, you may feel slightly restless. The lack of classical remains will probably be the cause of it. The shop front, the foreground of the picture, so to speak, is most vividly filled in with an Offenbach-like array of historical remains – eloquent of France, Britain, Venice, Turkey; but with the advent of Byzance, history seems to lose its outlines. Everything becomes submerged in myth and in poetry. (How did Odysseus find the place?) Somehow the fine tomb of old Menecrates seems rather a slender offering.

At this stage, you should go and visit the Medusa in the Corfu Museum. For she, the mother of the Gorgons, was
obviously the warden to the chthonic Greek world just as St Spiridion was the warden of the Byzantine world and the
modern
. The Medusa, more than life-size, is something which
profoundly
hushes the mind and heart of the observer who is not insensitive to myth embodied in sculpture. The insane grin, the bulging eyes, the hissing ringlets of snake-like hair, the spatulate tongue stuck out as far as it will go – no wonder she turned men to stone if they dared to gaze on her! She has a strange history, which is not made easier to understand by the fact that several versions of it exist. It is somehow appropriate that in her story we should come upon the name of Perseus, who
performed
a ritual murder on her, shearing off her head with a scimitar provided by Hermes. It was, in fact, a murder
performed
with the full complicity of the Olympians; the
equipment
for such a dangerous task (one glance and he would have been marmorealized) consisted of a helmet of invisibility (courtesy of Hades), winged sandals for speed (the Graiae daughters) and a sack for the severed head. However, it is with Perseus that the confusion of the myths begins and the traveller starts swearing at the unrelieved prolixity of the material, its vagueness, and indeed its incomprehensibility.

Two factors come into play here which are very Greek. The richness and incoherence of Greek myth arise because
successive
waves of invaders brought new versions, or even different grafts, with them to enrich a composite already extremely old, which had filtered by slow osmosis from places as far away as India, perhaps even China: a vast palimpsest of myths and tales to which real people had become attached, in which real figures had become entangled. Men became kings, and then gods even in their own lifetimes (Caesar, Alexander, for example). When Pausanias came on the scene – already terribly late in the day (the second century
AD
) – he was shown the tomb of the Medusa’s head in Argos and assured that she had been a real
queen famous for her beauty. She had opposed Perseus and … he cut off her head to show the troops. In Apollodorus’s
version
, however, she upset the touchy Athena, who organized the revengeful killing out of spite – and also because she wanted the powerful, spine-chilling head for her own purposes. Perseus (Athena was almost as affectionate towards him as towards Odysseus) skinned the Medusa as well, and grafted the horrid relic of the insane mask to the shield of Athena. This is a different story.

There are several other episodes among the different
biographies
of our Gorgon. In Hesiod’s poem, she fell in love with the rippling blue hair of Poseidon and gave herself to him in the depths of the sea. The trouble started there. Of the two children born, one was Pegasus, who afterwards flew to Olympus to live on at the side of Zeus – a symbol of aesthetic fancy, creative invention. However, in the Hesiod version too Athena guided the hand that performed the deed; Perseus turned away his face for fear of the eyes, letting Medusa’s head mirror itself in the shield he had been given.

The prolixity and apparently basic inconsistency of so much polytheistic material is exasperating, and tends to give travellers in Greece a kind of vertigo. Prolix without precision,
self-contradictory
more often than not, these gods and goddesses simply confuse one. When monotheism came into being and imposed the rigid rules of its beliefs upon this chaos, much of the old religion went underground, only to re-emerge in new forms. Far from conquering paganism, the new dispensation only succeeded in shoring up the old tattered and patched fabric of the ancient beliefs. Looking at the Corfu Medusa and reflecting on her Greek origins (she is dated 570
BC
) one is inclined to think that she would be better interpreted in terms of Indian yogic thought than in any other way. It is not
necessary
to ask if some new, free interpretation like this is valid – in
this domain it is every man for himself. Increasingly one is forced to read one’s own fair meanings into all this stratified jumble of myths.

The belt of snakes Medusa wears is significant and would provide the yogic interpretation with a point of departure – for they are bearded, and look like sacred hamadryad king-cobras – a symbol of the ancient yogas of the highest grade, Raja Yoga. This path to the perfected consciousness was known and expounded long before the Medusa came. To the Indian sages, the source of this perfected consciousness lay slumbering, coiled like a spring at the root of the spine in the vestigial and obsolete bone called the
os
coccyx
. (Curious that in the Jewish holy books the same bone is described as the bone of prophesy.) Anyway, the art of yoga is to awake this slumbering snake and let it rise, like mercury in a thermometer, to the skull, where it realizes the alchemically perfect consciousness – the highest consciousness of which man is capable. The two snakes of man’s basic (even genetic) dichotomy spiral round the
central
column and pass the holy influence up through a number of stations. (Perhaps the Stations of the Cross in Catholicism descend from here?) Yoga means yoke, and the two primordial forces are yoked and, when perfectly married, reach
simultaneously
the ultimate experience – the blinding zenith of Nirvana. Our modern medicine still retains the symbol of the caduceus, though the meaning has long since been forgotten. (The pine cone which tops the white wand in Greece once represented the all-seeing pineal eye.) But where the devil is Medusa in all this Jungian rigmarole?