Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor Read Free Book Online Page A

from a rope of clay that is paid out in an expanding and then a contracting coil until the final circle of the rim is complete; which is made to account for the ribs and the fluting that gird them from top to bottom....I had heard, all over Greece, that they came from Coroni in the Messenian peninsula, only the other side of the gulf. It was strange that, even here, there should be such a conflict of solutions. There were only four men in thelittle group I asked among the beached fishing boats. If there had been more, no doubt the total of solutions would have risen accordingly. [1]
    For the first time,—in conversation, and over the very few shops,—I became aware of one of the typical Maniot name-endings, one which is found nowhere else in Greece: Koukéas, Phaliréas, Tavoularéas, and so on. The last of these was the name of the schoolmaster, a charming and erudite man, who told us of the vanished temple of the nereids built there to commemorate the time the sea-nymphs came ashore to gaze at Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles—or Neoptolemos as he is called in Homer—when he set off for his wedding with Andromache’s rival, Hermione. The church, dedicated to the Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin, now occupies the site. There was a marble rosette in the centre of the floor under which a dowser, some years previously, had divined the presence of gold in large quantities a few metres down; perhaps gold ornaments in some pre-Christian tomb. Strangely, nobody had got busy with crowbars.... In a little room in the schoolhouse was a rose antique funerary slab with a beautifully incised epitaph in Hellenistic characters commemorating the great love and respect that all his contemporaries felt for the deceased, “the Ephebe Sosicles the Lacedaemonian.” The inscription ended with a delicate curved loop of knotted and fluttering ribbon. Above the village, in the burning and cactus-covered hillside, he pointed out two rectangular troughs hacked out of the rock: the graves, after all their vicissitudes, of Castor and Pollux; or so it was thought...they looked far too short for the great boxer and his horse-breaking twin whose constellations shine in the sky alternately. Further on a dark cistern was hewn in the mountain-side surmounted by a roughly carved lion’s head and, yetfurther, hard by the golden church lay the castellated remains of a fort with dungeons and barred windows and rough-hewn staircases. The little castle and the church, we were told, were built by one of the descendants of the Palaeologi who had sought refuge here from the Turks after the fall of Mistra in 1461.
    A large bell, green with verdigris, embossed with an effigy of a Catholic bishop with mitre and crosier and the legend that it was the “gift of the heirs of the de Bolis family,” hung in the belfry,—a present, perhaps, from the Venetians when the Maniots were their allies against the Turks; or loot from a pirate-raid. The schoolmaster said that Kolokotronis, when he was here with his klephts before the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence (for it was here that he foregathered with Mavromichalis and the Maniot leaders before attacking the Turkish garrison in Kalamata: the first act of the war after the standard of revolt was raised at the Monastery of Kalavryta on the 25th March, 1821), would play games of human chess in this very courtyard. The flagstones were chalked out like a board and his pallikars took up their positions in squares—I hope in the cool of the evening—while Kolokotronis, in his kilt and his fabulous fireman’s helmet, would stand on the wall and shout the moves, his opponent doing the same at the other end. The loser was condemned to take the victor for a ride on pick-a-back.
    It was a varied morning’s exploration.
    * * *
    I was alerted and fascinated by the schoolmaster’s mention of the Palaeologi, the reigning dynasty during the twilight of the Byzantine