Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (31 page)

What did the villagers believe were the causes of disease? Their answers take us back into the past. There were basically six types of cause mentioned, any of which might be regarded as the origin of a particular disease:

Only for the first of these, illness from natural causes, was the cure in any way scientific and it was recognised that better hygiene might be the answer. One villager said: ‘People are more vulnerable to illness if
they don’t wash, if they are dirty. Some don’t keep their house or body clean; they eat all kinds of dirty things – foods that are unwashed, or old, or otherwise soiled.’
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Many natural products were also thought to be helpful. Some were used alone, such as olive oil, honey, garlic or oleander leaves with which the sufferer was rubbed all over. Others were applied in seemingly bizarre combinations. There was a cream made of beans, olive oil and soap, used to cure abscesses. Even more strange was ‘mouse oil’, for cuts and earache: ‘What I do is to take baby mice caught when still hairless and blind, put them in a bottle of olive oil and leave them in that oil for at least one year in the sun. The longer it stays there in the sun the better. If you use it for cuts you stir it, for ears you do not. It is called “balsamo” and it stinks.’
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Even these treatments, perceived as medicinal, were usually applied in some ritual setting, and rituals were involved in countering all diseases, whatever their cause. The rituals involved incantations, often accompanied by prescribed gestures. Some were simple: ‘When as children we had pimples with pus, the old women told us to tread on the cloth which was used to clean the oven and say the words, “Let the pimple disappear as this cloth will disappear.” We always threw the cloth away.’
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Much more elaborate was the incantation used to cure several afflictions: the effects of the Evil Eye, a stomach complaint known as the wandering navel, and heart disease. This formula runs to some 200 words, and invokes birds, honey, milk, Christ, St Peter and St Paul, and a crooked man on a crooked road with a crooked basket. Other magical procedures involved amulets, which might contain gunshot to keep away supernatural beings, a blue stone to ward off the Evil Eye, or incense, bread or herbs. Numbers were also important elements of the prevention or cure of illness. ‘A charm to prevent miscarriages was made with forty coins, begged in forty homes, and blessed by forty liturgies.’
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Seven blessings and prayers were used against sorcery; diabetes was cured by eating herring intestines for three days.

The folk healers who conducted these procedures were usually local wise women, though some were men and some were outside the village, even as far off as Athens. One folk healer particularly respected and liked by the Blums was Maria. She lived in the village, understood suffering as she had lost three children of her own, accepted no fee and used science, magic and religion sometimes simultaneously. By contrast priests were only rarely called on to conduct healing prayers or exorcisms. This was in part because at this time they lived in the main village of the region, rarely visiting the other villages and expecting a gratuity when
they did so. It is likely that priests had a much larger role as healers in the past, when they lived among their parishioners and in many ways shared their lives.

An outsider might dismiss the folk healing methods as irrational superstition, and the country people who followed them as victims of trickery, but that would be too easy. First, the principles of folk medicine were based on a coherent and complex view of the world. This view was most fully expressed by the Sarakatsani, wanderers whose living conditions were primitive and who had been wholly illiterate until a few generations earlier, but – or perhaps as a result – were found particularly friendly, communicative and articulate. They believed firmly in God. John Campbell wrote: ‘I have met no Sarakatsanos who doubts the existence of God. Such a question seems to them unintelligent. A man takes out his watch and asks, “Somebody made this watch, is it possible that nobody made the world?”’
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God provides everything, from giving a man children to sending rain to make the grass grow. The sheep itself is a sacred animal, and is sacrificed at important church festivals. But God also judges and punishes the sins that interrupt communion with God. This communion can be maintained or restored through symbolic acts. These include, besides ritual animal sacrifices, taking part in church services, prayers for the intercession of the Mother of God or the saints, and regularly making the sign of the cross in daily life in recognition of Christ – ‘Christ is our brother,’ the Sarakatsani say.
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Over against God stands the Devil, the basic cause of evil. The Devil has corrupted with sins the good earth that God has created: ‘The Devil has the earth, God the Heavens.’
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For some sins a man is personally responsible: impiety, neglect or abuse of family and mistreatment of those outside the family. Other sins, inherited from Adam, are ancestral: sensuality and especially the envy that is inevitably present when resources are limited. These sins, being inherited, are not blameworthy, but a man shows his nobility by struggling against them as best he can.

The Devil takes many supernatural forms that can either lead into sin or inflict illness on men or animals. These include the nereids who appear as seductively beautiful maidens, the
kallikántzari
who are thieves, the
koukoúdhi
associated with the bubonic plague, and many others. These can be warded off by a variety of symbolic objects or rituals, some with links to the church. Among the objects are salt, fire, the red egg dyed at Easter or the head of a viper blessed by the church. The rituals include firing a gunshot with the left hand or a black-handled knife forming a cross with its scabbard.

The consistency and power of this belief system are clear. God is approached through the symbolic, the words of prayer and the rituals of the liturgy. Equally the Devil is fended off by incantations and symbolic acts. Even modern medicine cannot shake the system: a man may never have seen a nereid, but he has never seen a microbe either. Modern and traditional medicine are seen as simply different techniques for achieving the same result.

Furthermore, folk healing was useful in several important ways. It gave sufferers and their families something practical to do about the ailment, it provided a label for it, gave hope for a cure and information about the expected outcome. Folk healing methods could work by suggestion: if the wise woman tells you your headache will go as a result of her ministrations, it may very well do so. Or the treatment could simply be perceived to work: a sufferer from a short-term or intermittent illness goes to a folk healer and then recovers – but would have recovered anyway.

This reasoning, of course, has two major flaws. It assumes that if a treatment precedes a cure then the treatment causes the cure. Also it ignores discrepancies: if the treatment does not produce a cure it is assumed that there was something amiss in the treatment, so the system remains intact and can never be found to be mistaken. But as Richard and Eva Blum eloquently put it, ‘Rationality is a luxury. It can flourish only when protected and nourished; people who live in misery can hardly afford it; its magnificent edifice cannot be ordinarily sustained when there come those awful challenges of dire disease, social disorder, or the deprivation of love. In a sense then rationality can be sustained only by power: either the power of the individual to control events or the power to control himself.’
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It is often maintained that, during the centuries of foreign rule, by Turks and others, two things sustained the Greek people and linked them to the illustrious past of Byzantium and of ancient Greece. These are the Orthodox religion and the Greek language. Their defining role has been the exalted thesis of politicians, Church leaders and intellectuals. But we should not overlook a more humble third element, the beliefs and the practices of ordinary rural folk. Their view of the world sometimes overlapped with Church doctrine but was in the main independent of it. This other strand, central to the lives of so many, was an equally important element of Greek continuity.

16

Travellers to Greece

T
he earliest travellers to Greece were usually ambassadors or traders, and diplomacy and trade were closely linked. Later the interest turned to studying, and often removing, the antiquities of Greece. Throughout the period the travellers came mainly from France and Britain. France was involved in trading agreements and intermittent alliances with the Ottoman Empire, Britain was concerned mainly with trade, and both were interested in antiquities, prompted by learned societies or royal patronage. By contrast there were few travellers from Germany. Johann Winckelmann, famous for his books on the arts of ancient Greece, never set foot in the country, but relied on reports from a pupil and the study of reproductions in Italy.

Over the two centuries between the late sixteenth and the late eighteenth the travellers’ views of the Greeks swung from initial dismissal of them to eventual fervent support. At the beginning of the period the travellers often treated the Greeks with mockery bordering on contempt, but in time the Greeks were given increasing attention and some respect. Finally in 1770 the Orlov revolt, catastrophic failure though it was, raised the prospect of the liberation of Greece from the Turks and led to the wave of philhellenism that played no small part in the eventual achievement of Greek independence. The travellers’ accounts formed the views of Europe about Greece, but the process was two way: prevailing ideas in Europe influenced what the travellers expected to find, often at the cost of direct observation.

In the 150 years from the fall of Constantinople to around 1600 few travellers visited Greece. It was difficult to get to, dangerous to travel in and of little interest as a backward part of the Ottoman Empire. Greece then was about as attractive to visitors as, say, the remoter parts of China are today. Those who did visit any part of Greece generally did so with a specific purpose, but fortunately were also often interested in the Greeks and how they lived.

An example was the French naturalist Pierre Belon, whose account of his travels was published in 1553. He had read about the plants, animals and minerals of Greece in the ancient texts. ‘I am determined’, he wrote, ‘to go and see them in the place of their birth,’ and he was also
keen to acquire any knowledge ‘worthy of being communicated to our nation’.
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This included his opinions on the Greeks, which were on the whole derogatory. He particularly deplored their lack of education: ‘All the Greeks in both [Turkish and Venetian] areas are in such an amazing state of ignorance that there is not a single city in the entire country that has a university and not a trace of pleasure in learning the arts and sciences.’ The monks of Mt Athos were no better: ‘Among the six thousand Caloyers, who live on the mountain in such a great multitude, one can scarcely find in each monastery two or three who know how to read and write. This is because the prelates and the patriarchs of the Greek church, enemies of philosophy, excommunicated all the priests and monks who possessed, wrote, or read books other than those of theology.’ But Belon approved of the girls of Chíos, as did many later travellers. ‘Their beauty, grace, and loving courteousness’, he wrote, ‘disarm all the visitors inclined to gallantry. Their appearance is such that one would judge them to be nymphs rather than mortal women or girls.’
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Some 50 years after Belon, Greece was visited by the Scotsman William Lithgow, whom we have already met debunking the myth of Arcadia. Born in Lanark about 1582 Lithgow left Scotland, probably in 1602, after some scandal over a girl at which he only obscurely hints. Between 1609 and 1621 he made three long journeys, the first to Greece, Constantinople and the Holy Land, the second to the Barbary states of north Africa, and the third to Spain, from where he planned to go on to Ethiopia but was imprisoned in Malaga as a spy and tortured, after which he returned to England. His full account of his travels after leaving Scotland was published in 1632 as
The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares Travayles
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Lithgow’s book had all the ingredients for popular success. On a practical level it was a useful travel guide, summarising the history of places he visited and telling the traveller exactly how much he would have to pay – in chickins (Venetian sequins) or Spanish pistolls (pistolets, a gold coin precursor of the peseta) – for a guide or for access to the Holy Places. His style of writing was quirky and oddly attractive. It was marked by fine fanciful phrasing of the kind made popular by John Lyly in his 1578 novel
Euphues
and so known as euphuism. Lithgow’s vocabulary too was individual: ‘scelerate’ or ‘ruvidous’ for ‘wicked’, ‘fatigated’ for fatigued and ‘dispopulosity’ for ‘under-population’. The book was further enhanced by Lithgow’s self-abasing dedication of it to Charles I, in which he disingenuously claims that it is written ‘with a homely and familiar Stile, no ways fit for Sovereignty to peruse’.
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