Roumeli (6 page)

There were many more than eighty thousand of them twenty-five years ago, and, two hundred years ago, many, many more. So vast a population could not all come from one village; let alone (though his campaigns did promote shifts of populations among the regions under him, and, no doubt, among some of the Sarakatsáns as well) as recently as Ali Pasha's day, a century and a half ago. Apart from the contrary evidence, we would have known. The invariable tendency for nomads is to slow down and settle, not the opposite. When war or trouble drives villagers away they settle elsewhere. The nomad Sarakatsán life is a tissue of customs and usage from origins unreckonably remote.

How remote? The reader will have guessed how the wind is blowing...let us pause for a moment. There are few facts to build on but possibilities begin to assemble on which an edifice of further surmise may provisionally and diffidently be raised, and here it is: no one challenges the Greekness of the Sarakatsáns; all of them share common origins, customs, language and way of life; they have been total nomads for several centuries, probably much longer; they have always dodged official molestation and contact or marriage with strangers. They originally lived in the north-eastern mountains beyond the margin of history in regions hard of access and impervious to change; it is hard to say whether the duration of their way of life must be reckoned in hundreds of years or in thousands. Its origins are lost, as they say, in the mists of time.

But one aspect of their life may dispel these mists for a moment, and enable us, with utmost caution, to attribute a possible origin to these strange people: the identity of their textiles with the earliest Greek ceramics. Could those black and white rectangles, those woven dog-tooth staircases and saw-edges and triangles, that primitive interplay of angles and figures, spring
from the same source as the geometrical designs on early Greek pottery? Are these the missing clue to the beginnings of the Sarakatsáns? Were it so, the fragments cohere in a will o' the wisp hypothesis. No less than this: when the earliest Greeks wandered through the northern passes into the peninsula, some may have turned longing eyes on the pastures of the Pindus which lay all about them; on the Acarnanian mountains further south and the green winter grazing-grounds at their feet. They may have detached themselves and their flocks from the shining destinies of their ambitious brethren; while these expanded to the south over the Thessalian plain, founding villages and towns, and later, city states, perhaps the slow-moving drovers lagged behind in a pastoral splinter-group. Living primordially, grazing their beasts from their winter to their summer pastures, they may have remained in those regions until, at some intermediate date, they put forth shoots into the Macedonian and Thracian mountains, which in turn penetrated the more northern Balkans and Asia Minor in their seasonal search for fresh pastures. Given the mutual distrust which severed them from the plains, their horror of marriage with strangers and their skill at the vanishing trick, they would have escaped all contact with the Slavs and the other invaders in Byzantine times. Their aloofness would have exempted them from the foreign deposits which later comers left; leaving them, for better or for worse, the most Greek of all the Greeks. Far from commerce and the routes of civilization and the greed of the city states, their haunts made a late entry into recorded history. No wonder, then, that they went unchronicled.

Were all this true, they must have grazed their flocks in mid-air for aeons, vaguely aware, perhaps, of the War of Troy, the clash of the Greek cities, the elephants of Pyrrhus assembling in the valleys and Alexander's departure to conquer the world. News of the Roman onslaught, the landing of St. Paul on the Macedonian coast and the fall of the West would have
reached them late and garbled; the barbarian influx and the long afternoon and evening of Byzantium would have been slow to impinge. How soon would they have grasped the import of the passage of the Fourth Crusade just below them, and of the drums and tramplings of Amurath and of Bajazet the Thunderbolt and of the entry of Mohammed II into Constantinople? Perhaps they participated, in some peripheral way, in all these events. They are more likely to have remained aloof until the waterline of events, in the shape of guerrilla warriors in search of sanctuary, rose to their wigmans and sucked the nomads into history for a century or two. Now it has sunk, leaving them high and dry once more, their reclusion only broken by a change of pastures now and then, or a frontier closing, by grazing-disputes with the villagers, outbreaks of disease among their flocks and the shadowy siege of demons and ghosts and by the recurrence of red-letter-days and feasts and weddings.

 

Axel Hoeg, a Danish scholar flourishing earlier this century, was the original trail-blazer. I already knew his books, articles and pamphlets on the Sarakatsáns and their dialect, and his collection of their songs. I had an inkling, too, of his ideas about their origins. But what I had
not
read, for they only appeared
recently, were Angelika Hadjimichalis' two quarto volumes,
I Sarakatsáni
: wonderful books, based on a great knowledge of Greek art-history, ethnology, folklore and craftsmanship and many decades of research and fieldwork among the Sarakatsáns themselves. This lone scholar captured my trend at once. A third volume is in preparation—the great task, alas, has been delayed by ill-health—which promises to be the most interesting of the three. A lifetime of devotion and study has been lavished on these labours. It is impossible to speak of a definitive work; all here is surmise and the verdict must remain open: but
I Sarakatsáni
is the nearest thing to it; a rare and distinguished achievement in its incomplete state, the finished work will remain as a monument.
[15]

The only drawback to these volumes, is, for my purposes, an advantage: the author is advanced in years and the bulk of her exploration, perforce, was undertaken some time ago, and many of the nomads among whom her researches began, were chosen for their age and their long memories. The agents of detribalization, of which the author herself writes so sadly, have been hard at work. The tendency to settle has been accelerated by the closure of frontiers, the limitation of wandering, compulsory military service, and the denial of old grazing by civil authority and the settlement of two million refugees in old and undisputed pastures; and friction with villagers has helped to change the way of life of many of them. Some, though they still live in huts, became static a few generations back. Numbers of these live not far from Athens. “Yes, we're Sarakatsáns,” they ruefully say, “we think we come from Roumeli. Our grandfathers or our great-grandfathers settled here....
Allá eimaste bastardeméni
: we're bastardized....” The last quarter of a century has probably done more than the last three thousand years to
change the traditional life; it is amazing that so many have remained intact. Yet even among these, who are fortunately still the majority by far, the last few decades have taken toll of many ancient ways. The life described, then, in
I Sarakatsáni
belongs less to today than to forty years ago. It presents a fascinating and curious picture.
[16]

The pre-Christian legacy is never far from the surface in Greece.
[17]
In a society like the Sarakatsáns, pagan magic survives in a yet more pronounced shape and the superstructure of Christian form is correspondingly more shaky. Traditionally, there is no awareness of the existence of the Trinity. God the Father and Jesus are the same Person and He (or They) is known as
Aï
, a dialect abbreviation of
ayios
(
hagios
)—“saint” or “holy one.” Sometimes He is known as
Proto Aï
, or the First among the Saints, sometimes as
Aphenti
, the Lord, from the ancient Greek word
authentes
(from which the Turkish title, “
effendi
,” also derives). All over Greece, the army of saints has taken the place of the ancient pantheon. This is especially true among the nomads;
Aï
is little more than the first among His peers. As one would expect in a masculine and patriarchal society, male saints have cornered the high places in this celestial company. Numbers have been drastically reduced. Only a handful, from the thousands which overlap and crowd each other in the villagers' calendars and the Synaxary, have found their way into the huts. The greatest, as horseman, protector of flocks and folds and slayer of dragons and other predators, is St. George; his feast day, on April 23rd in the Gregorian calendar, corresponds perhaps to the great Roman shepherd festival of
the Parilia on the 27th. The prominence of horses in the life of the nomads also hoists St. Demetrius and St. Theodore, equestrians both, to a height which only St. George overtops. St. George's day is more important even than Easter, the crux of the Orthodox year. Red eggs similar to the Easter-symbols are distributed and the finest black lamb of the flock—black animals are more highly prized than white—is ritually sacrificed. (Easter is only marked by a white.) Oaths taken in the name of St. George are the most binding. St. George and St. Demetrius have another claim to fame: their feasts—May 6th and November 9th in the New Calendar—mark the start of the pastoral summer and winter when the leases for grazing begin and end and the
tsellingas
makes a new pact with his clan. They are days of decision. His mountain-top shrines make the prophet Elijah especially revered. (
Elias
in Greek; the nomads call him “St. Lios.” When the Greek world went Christian he took over the hilltop fanes to Helios-Apollo, on the strength of his name and partly because both their careers ended in the sky in fiery chariots.)
[18]
“He's a mountain man like us,” they say, “he lives in the wilderness and wanders from peak to peak. He helps us and we hallow him.” The Blessed Virgin is addressed under one of her many epithets; they call her
Parigorítissa
, the Consolatrix; as an alien and a woman who has somehow insinuated herself into their midst, her honours are fairly cursory. St. Paraskeví is another female saint with some status. Each
stani
—each “fold,” clan or gathering of families and huts—has its own feast day, fortuitously depending on chapels that lie in their favourite pastures. Some have won general acceptance: the Assumption—like Elijah's, the eponymous churches often perch on mountains; St. Constantine, the champion of Hellenism; the Deposition and the Purification; and in the Agrapha mountains, the Nativity of the Virgin, thanks to her great monastery
there, hard of access in the Proussos gorge. Our Lady of Vella, between Yanina and Konitza, is honoured for a like reason. St. Athanasios is not cultivated as a Doctor of the Church, but, unexpectedly, as a warden of flocks. They neglect his January name-day because it falls in lambing-time and celebrate it later in the year. The fondness of Macedonian Sarakatsáns for St. John the Baptist is probably due to his shaggy iconographic outfit: it looks far more like their own goat-skin homespun than camel-hair; he lived in the wilderness too. They boil beans on his feast day and distribute and eat them in church. The bean-feast is linked with pagan magic ceremonial at harvest time and commemorates, almost certainly, the Pyanepsia when the ancients boiled and ate broad beans to bring fertility and a year of plenty.

The usual pan-hellenic spirits—Pagans, Airy or Shadowy Ones, Exotics, vampires, werewolves, dragons, ghosts and Kallikantzaro-centaurs—people their cosmogony and infest the folds. They can be exorcized by counter-spells and baffled by phylacteries of dog's droppings; a dried snake's head, hidden in a church for forty days and then retrieved, is sovereign against many baleful manifestations. To the Nereids, a danger for all lonely shepherds near pools and streams, young Sarakatsáns are particularly exposed. They are struck dumb and robbed of their wits by blundering on their revels by mistake, as mortals were sometimes turned into trees if they had the bad luck to interrupt the dances of the nymphs. There are mixed nomad-Nereid marriages and these water-girls steal healthy Sarakatsán babies from their hanging cradles, leaving sickly changelings in their stead. Demons of every kind and gender dog shepherds' footsteps uphill and down dale and “chase them into woods,” as the saying goes. The nomads are a special target for female supernaturals called the
Kalotyches
—(“the good fortunes”: like the name
Eumenides
(“the kindly ones”) for the Furies, this is a wry placating misnomer)—who are half women, half she-asses and
snake-locked like Medusa. They plague the flocks and bring bad luck at lambing time and childbed and they are especially dangerous during the forty days following a birth. Other Shadowy Ones lurk round the pallets of the ailing and the dying. But the darkest villain in Sarakatsán demonology is a male spirit known as the
Daouti. Daoutis
, sometimes called Pans, are the wildest, strongest and wickedest of them all. Shaped like satyrs, with a body half-goat, half-human and long legs with cleft hoofs, they have the heads of rams and long twirling horns. Like other demons—the Shadowy Ones and the
Kalotyches
, in particular—
Daoutis
are doubly threatening to flocks at three seasons: in Advent (just before lambing, that is); in late April or early May, as the shepherds prepare to leave their winter quarters for the mountains; and from the feast of the Transfiguration until the end of August. They swoop shrieking like birds of prey and the flocks cower in caves and sheepfolds. After two or three of these onslaughts, the beasts begin to perish by the dozen. They swell up and die. Sliced tortoise meat is brought into play as a counter-spell and the shepherds shift camp at once. If a priest can be found, he sprinkles the new site with holy water and the bells are removed and blessed. Unlike most wicked spirits, these
Daoutis
attack without shame in broad daylight, and, having the knack of making friends with the dogs, they pad along after the flocks unmolested; so, when an emergency fold is built, the shepherds leave their dogs behind and kindle fires to form a magic circle of smoke.
Daoutis
learn the Christian names of mortals, so if they hear strangers calling the shepherds hold their tongues: answering might strike them dumb for ever. These terrible spirits spread sudden panics and when they are not busy doing evil they settle out of sight but within earshot and play their flutes.