Free Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor Page B

eastern funerals, it goes without saying that emotional and histrionically gifted women react in a more spectacular fashion than the rest. Tongues are sometimes clicked when funerals are discussed if a performance has been too obviously stagey, too shameless an exploitation of opportunity. Nearly everything in Greece has its balancing corrective. “Poor old Sophia was piling it on a bit,” one sometimes hears people say, “I couldn’t look at her....” The men of the family often appear uncomfortable while all this goes on; changing feet, turning their caps nervously round and round in their fingers, keeping their eyes glued to the ground with all the symptoms of male embarrassment at a purely feminine occasion. “May God pardon all his sins,” the men say, “May his memory be eternal,” and “Let the earth rest upon him lightly;” and no more. For death and burial are one of the few occasions in Greek peasant life when women come into their own and take over. After longyears of drudgery and silence and being told to shut up they are suddenly on top and there is no doubt that for some of them, famous miroloyistrias , wailers with a turn for acting and a gift of improvisation, these are moments secretly longed for. They will undertake immense journeys to bewail a distant kinsman, or even, in extreme cases, people they have never met. Some of them are in great demand. “When I told old Phroso that Panayoti was dead and buried,” I once heard somebody observe with a wry smile, “she didn’t say, ‘May God pardon all his sins,’ but ‘What a shame I missed being there to wail for him.... Who did the miroloy ? Old Kyriakoula? Po! po! po! She doesn’t even know how to start....’”
    But the dirges of the Mani are a very different matter from these unco-ordinated cries. They are entire poems, long funeral hymns with a strict discipline of metre. Stranger still, the metre exists nowhere else in Greece. The universal fifteen-syllable line of all popular Greek poetry is replaced here by a line of sixteen syllables, and the extra foot entirely changes the sound and character of the verse.
    Â 
    Â Â The klephts were sleeping by the brook and all the world was sleeping
    Â Â Only the youngest of them all lay with his eyelids open.
    Â 
    goes the ordinary Greek decapentesyllabic rhyming couplet. The sixteen-syllable line of a Maniot dirge goes like this:
    Â 
    Â Â And when you reach the Underworld, greet all the Manis dead for me,
    Â Â Greet John the Dog and Michael Black, tell them we’ll soon be meeting there.... [2]
    Â 

    They are sung extempore by the graveside, and it seems that the Maniot women, like the unlettered mountaineers in Crete in the invention of mantinades , [3] have this extraordinary knack of improvisation. There are, of course, certain conventional phrases that recur (like the epithets and the unchanging formulae that cement the Odyssey ) which give time for planning the next two lines. But anyone who has heard the speed with which the Cretans can turn any incident on the spot into a faultless rhyming couplet and each time with an epigrammatic sting in the second line (here again the slow embroidered repetition of the first line by the company gives the singer a few seconds for thought), will not find this hard to believe. The similarity of these miroloyia with the themes of ancient Greek literature, most notably with the lament of Andromache over the body of Hector, coupled with the fact that this region remained pagan till six entire centuries after Constantine had made Christianity the official Greek religion, and with the fact that they only exist in the Mani, tempts one to think that here again is a direct descendant of Ancient Greece, a custom stretching back, perhaps, till before the Siege of Troy.
    On the alert for dirges ever since arriving in the Mani, I had managed to collect a number of broken fragments