Free Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Italianate cantadas of the Ionian isles, sung to the sound of guitars and mandolines—one could compile a long list. Nearly all of them, however, are written in the decapentesyllabic line, sometimes in rhyming couplets. The metre is slightly monotonous to read—it has something of the jaunty iteration of Locksley Hall —but sung, with their peculiar caesurae, repetitions of half lines, long drawn modulations and guttural ejaculations and apostrophes, they are full of life and variety. Many of them accompany Greek country dances.
    Here again the Mani deviates. There is little dancing, and if one were writing a thesis to prove their descent, one might well adduce the absence of popular poetry among the Maniots as a heritage by default, a negative heirloom, of philistine Lacedaemon’s enmity to the Muses. Naturally, this generalization is not quite true, for one form of popular poetry does exist in the Mani which has been largely extinct elsewhere since ancient times and this is so singular and remarkable, so representative of the sombre traditions of the peninsula, that it largely compensatesfor the dearth of all other kinds. The miroloyia (“words of destiny”), the metrical dirges of the Mani, are an isolated phenomenon.
    Mourning and funeral rites have an importance in Greece that exceeds anything prevailing in western Europe, and the poorer and wilder the region—the fewer the tangible possessions there are to lose, and the less the possibilities of material consolations and anodynes—the more irreparable and sad seems loss by death. The expression of this distress is correspondingly more articulate. In these regions the thread of life is brittle. Survival seems something of a day-to-day miracle and life itself, in spite of the impetuousness with which it can be cut off, is doubly precious.
    There is, in practice, little belief in a conventional after-life and the rewards and sanctions of Christian dogma. In spite of the orthodox formulae of the priest at the graveside it is not for a Christian eternity, for a paradise above the sky, that the dead are setting out, but the Underworld, the shadowy house of Hades and the dread regions of Charon; and Charon has been promoted from the rank of ferryman of the dead to that of Death himself, a dire equestrian sword-wielder. “Charon took him,” a widow will sigh, contradictorily enmeshing her torso with a dozen signs of the cross. “He left me for the Underworld... It was his destiny, it was written. He had eaten his bread and he had no days left. May God forgive all his sins and may the All Holy Virgin give me strength....” When someone is ill, not only the doctor and the priest are summoned but the local witch with her incantations and charms, and when he dies, he is supplied with a coin for the ferryman; after his burial, the pagan funeral cakes are solemnly eaten and the men let their beards grow in sign of mourning. There is no clash in the Greek mind between these two allegiances, but a harmonious unchallenged syncretism comparable to the observances at many a Calabrian shrine. I once saw a Cretan priest exorcizedby sorceress of a tiresome sciatica caused by the Evil Eye. For this relief he immediately lit a thanksgiving candle before the ikon of his patron saint.
    The thread of life, then, is very brittle. In the remote mountains of Greece, on the bare rocks by day and by the glimmer of rush-lights at night, the skull seems close to the surface and struggling to emerge. One sees it plainly beneath the hollow eye-sockets and cheeks and the jawbone’s edge, and in old people, wasted by toil and poverty and fever and worry, it looms—the moment the bright glint of conversation fades to the dark and fatalistic lustre of thought—pathetically close. [1] Death is a near neighbour, slight ailments cause exaggerated anxiety among the most robust and more serious illnesses often induce the despair of a wild animal, an