Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor Read Free Book Online

are a useless lot. They’re Vlachs.”
    â€œVlachs? Surely not in the Peloponnese?”
    â€œThat’s what we call them.”
    I said I had never heard of any Vlachs south of the Gulf of Corinth, and never expected to find any in the Mani. [1]
    â€œThis isn’t the real Mani,” he said, “it’s what they call the Exo Mani, the Outer Mani. You have to wait till you get to the Deep Mani, the Mesa Mani, south of Areopolis, before finding true Maniots. They are quite a different thing. Honourable, tall, good-looking, hospitable, patriotic, intelligent, modest——”
    â€œSo you don’t come from Kampos?”
    â€œMay God forfend!”
    â€œWhere from, then?”
    â€œFrom the Deep Mani.”
    Â 
    [1] See page 86.

3. KARDAMYLI: BYZANTIUM RESTORED
    K AMPOS by daylight was a hot, characterless little town and we were glad to leave. While we waited for the bus in the market-place, the Deep Maniot with the sorrowful countenance came loping towards us under his giant Mambrino’s helmet of straw. He produced a clean blue handkerchief in which some plums and greengages were knotted. Peeling them carefully with a jack-knife, he dropped them into glasses of retsina to cool and then offered them in turn impaled on a fork. There are times in Greece when you feel you could live with as little forethought about food as Elijah; meals appear as though laid at one’s elbow by ravens. Our benefactor was in the throes of acute melancholia. He hated living in Kampos among all these half-baked Vlachs. He spoke once more of the Deep Mani as a longed-for and unobtainable Canaan. Why didn’t he live there? “Don’t ask,” he said, and made that tired circular gesture with his open hand suggesting a piling up of complications on which it was too tedious and vexatious to embark. “Troubles...” he said. It occurred to me that he was perhaps involved in one of the feuds for which the Mani is notorious and had fled to these alien lowlands for refuge.
    â€œYou ought to be there in the autumn,” he said, “when the quails fly over in millions. We spread nets and set traps for them and roast them on spits.... If you gave me your address in London and if God grants me life till the autumn I could get my niece down there to fill up a great can with quails in oil foryou to eat as a mézé in London.... We could seal it up at the top with a soldering iron....”
    The bus rattled us along a switchback road above the Messenian Gulf. Twice everybody had to dismount and negotiate bad bits of road, until, after an hour, we came in sight of Kardamyli, a castellated hamlet on the edge of the sea. Several towers and a cupola and a belfry rose above the roofs and a ledge immediately above them formed a lovely cypress-covered platform. Above this the bare Taygetus piled up.
    It was unlike any village I had seen in Greece. These houses, resembling small castles built of golden stone with medieval-looking pepper-pot turrets, were topped by a fine church. The mountains rushed down almost to the water’s edge with, here and there among the whitewashed fishermen’s houses near the sea, great rustling groves of calamus reed ten feet high and all swaying together in the slightest whisper of wind. There was sand underfoot and nets were looped from tree to tree. Whitewashed ribbed amphorae for oil or wine, almost the size of those dug up in the palace of Minos, stood by many a doorway. Once more I wondered how these immense vessels were made. They are obviously too big for any potter smaller than a titan with arms two yards long. As usual, theories abound. Some say a man gets inside the incipient jar like a robber in the Arabian Nights, and builds up the expanding and tapering walls as they rotate on a great wheel; some, that the halves are constructed separately and then put together; others that they are cast in huge moulds; yet others assert that they are built up