Shipboard Relics

 

We take a tourist boat along the coast of Mount Athos to the end of the peninsula. It is packed with men and women of all ages on a parish pilgrimage. Although I have been on Athos several times, it is impressive to see it from the sea, especially the breathtaking monasteries of the rocks perched on vertiginous cliffs. Seagulls in the air keep us company, dolphins arcing in the water lead us on.

Opposite Xenophontos monastery we think we have broken down because the boat stops and drops anchor with ominous mechanical growlings. But rescue is at hand. A little speedboat of the kind that pulls water skiers zips on a cloud of spray from the shore, manned by four monks, two of them standing in the cockpit, robes streaming behind them. The two that were sitting in the back of the boat are older and more distinguished than the lads having fun in front.Our boat lowers a platform at the stern and they climb aboard.  

They have indeed brought salvation, a spiritual kind, in a black chest and a couple of polished wood cases. On a table swiftly erected by the crew on the rear deck they lay out an altar with cloths and bejewelled caskets of relics. Xenophontos has a drop of blood of John The Baptist and a fragment of the skull of St Stephen the first martyr, but I don’t catch if they are included. One of the young monks puts the wooden cases on a table next to the bench where we are sitting. He opens them up to reveal a travelling repository of medals, crucifixes, icons, prayer ropes and other souvenirs soon to be transmuted into contact relics. 

I join the crowd for chanting and hymns and browsing the memento tray then queue up for the veneration, handing little plastic bags of purchases to the presiding priest to dunk onto the caskets. My wife looks on, bemused, as I take my turn, make the sign of the cross, bow and air-kiss the caskets.“See, woman, if you can’t go to Athos, Athos will come to you,” I say when I come back to the bench. She frowns. When everyone is catered for the monks pack up. The one in charge of the repository next to us presses a little icon of the Virgin into my wife’s hand and smiles. She scrabbles in her purse for money but he puts his free hand on his chest. The monks get into their boat with smiles and handshakes to speed back home in a cloud of exhaust and spray. My wife is touched. She still keeps the icon in her handbag.

Xenophontos has several other enterprising ventures reaching out to the wider world. Apart from icons, Turkish Delight, its own label wine - the white is not bad at all - the monks market a range of pharmaceutical products, including hair restorer and haemorrhoid cream, of which I have heard good reports from pious friends in Athens.

Russian Potatoes

 From an interview with Mary Dinan in 'The Global Suitcase'

Q:  Why did you choose Russia for your jacket potato business?

My so-called business was a way of getting deeper into what was happening in Russia at the time than by journalism or tourism. Russia is a fascinating country. It was a fascinating time. There was a revolution going in. I wanted to get stuck in. Be part of it. For me business is an excuse not a goal.

Q: What went wrong?

Russia was the biggest potato producer in the world. I was told by the man responsible for coordinating Soviet production of potatoes I would not find a single one you could serve up in its jacket.  He was right. The coup de grace was being summoned to meet the mafia over breakfast at nine o’clock in the morning at a topless restaurant. They wanted ten percent of the takings in return for protection against other mafia or the police who were just as bad. No thank you.

Q:  Did you go to Russia with the purpose of writing a book?

I never do anything with the intention of writing a book. I write about it afterwards if there's a good story but often there isn't or I can't be bothered.

Q:  What did you think of Russia?

Where do you start? History, geography, politics, society, culture...full of contrasts and contradictions. Run by gangsters and inhabited by generous and cultivated people. Its sheer size is overwhelming, matched by the resilience of a people subject to the most appalling acts of tyranny and war over the past century.

Q:  Is it easy to break into Russian life?

In general I found people very hospitable and with a great sense of humour. Even if it means going naked on the ice after a sauna in 20 below. You can get on well if you are white and speak some Russian and resist getting on a high horse about how things are done. There is a Russian proverb: Don't go into someone else's monastery with your own rule. 

Q: Did the corruption disturb you?

It is a blow to my self-esteem that no-one has ever tried to bribe me.

Q: What is the new Russia like?

Wonderful for a minority of wealthy middle class. No much different from the old one for many. A lot worse for some.There’s as much graft and bribery and official corruption and violence as there ever was. It’s now  institutionalised, centred on the Kremlin and the government. If you do business or go to court or deal with the tax inspector it’s who you know and who you can, let’s say influence. In the big cities at least people have jobs and salaries and flats and cars and can lead a more or less normal life. Look at the millions of ordinary Russians who go abroad on holiday. 

Q: How did you adapt to the Russian winter?

Like a Russian. Fur and booze.

Q:  Tell us about riding on the pig’s back

On my first official visit to a Russian farm I was dressed up like a bank manager in a dark suit and tie and shiny shoes. It was an old fashioned farmyard with lots of animals except that it was two feet deep in thick black mud. The first indignity was being carried across it piggy back by the farmer.  Inside we were treated to homebrew vodka and raw pickled piglet tails. I sneaked outside to get some fresh air to keep the piglet tails down and there in front of me was a wonderful Russian landscape like something out of Dr Zhivago. It was so beautiful. I instinctively walked towards it across some stepping stones in the mud. Except I discovered too late they weren’t stepping stones. Do you remember when James Bond skipped across the backs of crocodiles? Crocodiles swim flat and their backs are knobbly but pigs are slimy and buck up and down. It was a wonderful adrenalin rush. Pig surfing in a sea of mud. But I’m no better at surfing on a pig than a surfboard. Everyone was very nice. I had a hose down outside to get the worst off and then went inside for a shower and a change of clothes. When I went back into the kitchen dressed like a farm labourer they all clapped. “Oh Ivan, Welcome to Russia.’

Q: You set up a company with an institute of Biochemistry of the Russian Academy of Science. Tell us more. 

They had bacterial technology for purifying industrial air emissions that was ten years of anything in the west. I set up a British company to market it. Russian bugs help to keep the air of Wolverhampton and Wigan sweet.

Q: Does this make you an Oligarch?

Everyone is an oligarch in their own mind. 

The Travel Bug

 Interview with Mary Dinan for 'The Global Suitcase'

Q: What are your earliest memories of travel?

When I was six years old, my father went on a business trip to the USA. He flew there and came back on the Queen Mary. My mother, little sister and I were driven to Southampton in a big car with leather seats and we came back by train. I had never been on a train before. The compartment filled with American toys and the excitement of family reunion led me to collect train journeys throughout the world. 

Q:  What drew you to Greece?

For as long as I can remember I’ve loved Greek stories. I get a thrill from standing in places that are part of my mental landscape. This year I went to Pergamon, Sardis and Troy and although there's not much to see, they live in the imagination and give me the feeling of coming home. 

Q:  What was it like to live in Athens after London? Was it difficult to adapt?

Life in Greece was so different from  Britain. Foreigners and children are welcome. Families and family values are predominant. Good humour, cheerfulness, optimism, argument, sociability, an obsession with food and talking about food. It was a most engaging and refreshing place to live. It was so easy to adapt, so easy to flee from Thatcher's Britain, so easy to throw off snobbery and stand-offishness and weather and introversion and xenophobia and...you name it. 

Q: You saw Greece when it was re-building after seven years of dictatorship. How has it changed? 

It's hardly changed at all. Greeks have stumbled from one political and economic catastrophe to another since its independence. Their ideals and aspirations have always outstripped an ability to realise them. They are the instigators of their own problems and blame foreigners for them. 

It isn’t Arcadia by any means – poverty, emigration, corruption, rightwing/leftwing political fissures are woven into society. The basic Greek social unit is the extended family and the network of mutual obligations and loyalties that bind it together. The net stretches very far. The dark side of this is the mistrust, the desire to outdo and do down other 'families'. It makes the kind of civic society we have in Northern Europe very hard to replicate. For example the idea that an elected representative should defend the interests of all their constituency and not just of those who voted for them is alien in Greek politics. 

Q: Would you prefer the Greece of today or yesterday? Would you like time to stand still?

Time does stand still. It's us who grow old and die. It's best to make the most of now.

Q: You met some colourful characters on your travels. Who was the most memorable?

- The Mogho Naba, King of the Mossi tribe, under a baobab tree outside his palace in Ouagadougou surrounded by aged courtiers and a woman killing chickens behind me. Since childhood he was fed millet beer and consequently filled his outdoor throne, a two seater G-plan sofa. He has considerable political power in parallel with the official institutions.

- A Yemeni driver I engaged whenever I went to the Gulf. He learned his few words of English in the British hospital in Aden when it was a colony. He'd greet you by snapping to attention, saluting and booming in Home Counties English “Good morning Sah. Have your bowels moved?”  He demonstrated his expertise at catching snakes and summoning the Haji Eagle in Abu Dhabi zoo.

- Pat O'Connor of the British army catering corps. He saw plenty of action in the Korean War. Forward troops did not have ration packs but were supplied from the corps  kitchens. Pat's job  was to guard deliveries of Irish stew and spotted dick from Chinese ambush. Their motto was 'The stew must get through'. Now a sprightly octaganerian and full of stories.

- Elpida the wise woman of our Greek village who cured my back back with a raw egg, herbs and incantations.

- Mother Shyama, (Guru Shyama Devi) a lovely lady who founded the Radha Krishna Ashram in Balham. She radiated goodness and welcome. She is credited with the gift of bilocation having simultaneously attended weddings in Leicester and South London. 

Q:  Who was the most influential person you met on your travels?

In St Petersburg I once lectured a room of politicians about entrepreneurship. They included one of the two new deputy mayors, Vladimir Putin. He’s a little chap so in those days you wouldn’t pick him out in a crowded room. Perhaps I gave him an idea or two.

Q: What was your most memorable journey?

How to choose? The most eye-opening was the train from Abidjan in Cote D'Ivoire  to Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. Then to Niamey and northern Niger by bus and taxi. It was fascinating to see the transition from tropical forest through savannah to the Sahara and how peoples adapt to their environment. 

The country I find the most expensive and the best value for money is Japan. Everything is different or odd or baffling but always exquisite.

Q:  What is the most hilarious experience you have had while travelling 

I’ve had plenty. Once I went into a church in Moscow where a service was going on. Lovely Russian choir. It was packed except for a side chapel. The main occupants were two dead old ladies lying in open coffins. One of them had lots of mourners standing around her and flowers and candles and stuff. The other had nobody. I felt sorry for her being on her own. So I lit a candle and stuck it on her coffin. When I backed off another little old lady grabbed my arm. I got a shock because she looked just like the dead one.  “She knew you’d come” she said. 

She dragged me off to an old man leaning on two sticks. I was nervous in case it was my putative father. But she stuck his hand in mine and told me to take him outside to the soup kitchen next door. He was a horrible yellow colour and covered in bright red scabs and had the worst case of the shakes. We shimmied and shook down the aisle and when we got outside he steered us to a whitewashed shack that was a makeshift lavatory. In front of gutter he had a lot of trouble undoing himself and he said “hold it please”. Oh Lord. In for a penny. So I took it out for him. Remarkably, and very conveniently, it was the only bit of him that didn’t shake. I tried to think beautiful thoughts. I tucked him back in and he looked up at me. “I only wanted you to hold my stick. But thanks anyway.”

Q In 1995 you set up and implemented a project to control water hyacinth on Lake Victoria, Tanzania. How did you become aware of this as a problem?

Sitting on the shore of the lake chatting to fishermen who couldn't launch their boats. 

Q: What do you most like about London?

The British library. I collect library reader's cards in preparation for old age: Bodleian, Bibliothėque Nationale, Gennadius in Athens, Lenin Library. There's always a warm radiator, something to read and somewhere quiet to doze off.

Q: Do you ever go on a conventional holiday?

I like trundlecasing - the bus-passer's equivalent of backpacking. A step away from shoppingtrolleying, then zimmering. Travelling on buses and staying in hors-suite rooms with no bedside light and mosquito splats on the walls. I love the rumble of a trundle case, so romantic, like a ship’s siren.

Q: What have you learned from your travels?  

First, never leave home without six feet of string. So many uses from a tourniquet to a washing line. 

Second, avoid airports. My millennial resolution was never again to fly over anywhere I hadn't seen on the ground. Six weeks later I was invited to Korea. I took the Trans-Siberian to Beijing and then trains and buses. I’ve stuck to it ever since. When I do fly it's satisfying to look at the map on the seat in front and know what's down there.

Keep The Shiny Side Up

Keep The Shiny Side Up is the motto of us knights of the road. It means keeping the bike upright. Not so easy. I fall off. I have near misses. It has never been anyone else's fault. I'm not a good driver. Sometimes I am admiring the scenery or myself in the mirror or a leggy girl on the pillion of a fellow knight or otherwise not paying proper attention, so I go into a ditch or the back of a parked car or a pothole. Fortunately I have not yet tumbled into the path of a moving vehicle or broken a bone. I have escaped with bruises, cuts, grazes and quiet evenings at home picking gravel out of my skin with tweezers. 

The reward is to feel in touch with the world, senses heightened not dulled in the isolation bubble of a car. I take three times longer to get anywhere but feel I've done something worthwhile. There doesn't need to be much of a view. A bird, a tree, the grass at the side of the road, brought to life by the breeze of going past, give a sense of witnessing something. And by witnessing the world I witness myself.

A lot of the time I watch the tarmac for potholes, debris and roadkill but even this can be enthralling on different shades and patterns of grey, like travelling along an unending abstract painting. I am a connoisseur of road surfaces and get a thrill when they are unusual or beautiful. I once went out of my way to follow a tractor pulling a trailer-full of fresh slaughtered sheep because of the blood-red splashes in the white dust. I recently lay on the asphalt with Harley pinning down my left leg, entranced by the close-up of pearly gravel scattered in mother-of-pearly oil glistening in the sunlight. Aesthetic enjoyment may have had something to do with the elation of not being dead but this is true of many pleasures.

A hazard on the back roads is tortoises. I have yet to see one among the road kill. Perhaps it is because they are not built for darting out in front of you. There is plenty of time to see them, like rocks in the middle of the road. Another possibility is that they sleep at night, when most road killing happens. The hazard is more for drivers, who brake, pull over, get out to carry the tortoise out of danger and are hit by passing vehicles. I like to enhance the tortoise’s flight, soaring up and plummeting down, banking and weaving, making aeroplane noises. The aerophobic shrink into their shells, others crane their necks to enjoy the view or paddle their legs under the illusion that they are responsible. Or dreaming. Or a shaman among tortoises. 

It seems odd that the tortoise is one of the symbols of speedy Hermes in sun hat and seven league sandals, the messenger of the gods. The reason is that he invented the lyre with a tortoiseshell as the soundbox, the first bouzouki.

Pagan Mount Athos

  

The Athos peninsula is about 50km long and 10km wide. A central spine of mountain ridge runs down the middle and rises to the peak at the southern tip. Water courses, ravines, and valleys run down like ribs on either side. In the west and on plateaux there is cultivable land while the rest is thick forest, home to boar, foxes, jackals, wolves, reptiles, and birds. 

Paths follow the spine, the valleys down to the sea, and the perimeter shore. People walked them long before the first monks arrived. In the middle of the fifth century BC Herodotus wrote in his, and up to then the only, history book that Athos was a great and famous mountain with cities prosperous enough pay tribute to Athens, which had built an empire on the strength of defeating the Persians.

Settlements included temples to Artemis on the site of Great Lavra monastery and to her brother Apollo on the site of present-day Ierissos. The summit of the mountain had a shrine to Zeus. It was also a signalling beacon, part of a system that could send messages throughout Anatolia and Greece. In his play Agamemnon Aeschylus describes how news of the fall of Troy was relayed by fire and smoke from nearby Mount Ida to Athos and onwards via the mountaintops to Mycenae in Argos where Clytemnestra was preparing to kill him in the bath.

Athos was populated by Greeks until the 6th century CE when it was devastated by plague and Slav invasion. In the 9th century the Byzantines reoccupied the peninsula, bringing in Greeks and Armenians from Asia Minor. In the 10th century the first monks built monasteries on the ruins of the old temples and opened up the same paths that served them a thousand years before. Some of the paved paths survive, called as Kalderimi, from the Turkish kaldırım, a pavement (built). The cobbles and stone slabs are probably the oldest monuments on Athos.

There are other traces of a rich pagan past. High up in the wall of the courtyard of Koutloumousiou, near the main gate, is an ancient grave stele, a tombstone with the bas-relief of a seated woman dipping into a jewellery box held by her maid standing in front of her: a common domestic scene showing the status of the dead woman. It dates from around the middle of the fourth century BC. What are two pagan women doing inside the monastery? Hard to say, unless they were thought to represent some biblical scene. But they point to the probability that Karyes was a thriving settlement. Several other monasteries have traces of a pre-Christian past in the form of sculptures, sarcophagi, and walls. Outside the refectory of the Great Lavra the porch is supported by ancient columns turned upside-down to counter their malevolent influence. 

Since the early Fathers of the Christian church, theologians and historians were hostile to pagan religion, seeing in it the material validation of sins, vices, and passions. At the same time they acknowledged the heritage of language, philosophy, and arts, ideas and imagery they received from their predecessors. In the murals of some monasteries pre-Christian celebrities are co-opted into the Christian narrative. The porch of Vatopedi’s main gate is adorned with Greek philosophers and the Erythraean Sibyl who foretold the coming of Christ. In the refectory of Great Lavra Alexander the Great is drafted in to defeat the Persian Darius, foretelling the battle between Christianity and Islam. 

The Byzantine artist of the murals in the church of Dochiariou goes further, showing Alexander ascending into Heaven and in pomp with the Emperor Augustus, Nebuchadnezzar, and Darius.

Under the gables of the entrance to the refectory of Great Lavra the celebrated fresco painter Theophanes the Cretan depicted the Annunciation in about 1540. The Angel Gabriel on the left announces the ‘Logos’, the ‘Word’ to Mary on the right. Between them is an ancient Greek plaque with a votive inscription and a huge human ear in high relief. The inscription reads, ‘Neuris offered this to Artemis Agrotera (the Wild-One).’ It has been dated to the fifth century BC. The ear has been co-opted into the scene because it was thought to be the organ through which the Virgin received the Logos by which she conceived.  And who is that slinking away in the extreme right of the scene, with no halo, tell-tale red hair and distaff? Artemis. 

Wine for the King of England

The museum of Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos has manuscripts, icons, crucifixes and many other priceless treasures of the last thousand years. Among them is a pink and green tin that contained a slice of the wedding cake of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. It is empty as the abbot ate the cake. Prince Charles has been coming on private visits to Athos for many years. He is a celebrity among the monks and not just those of Vatopedi, as we discovered when four of us were billeted at a smaller monastery as part of the annual path-clearing project of the Friends of Mount Athos.

Father George was a useful man to know as he was the cellar master. One evening in the cool of his cellar we sat around a table among massive barrels with a tin of smoked fish and a jug of decent red from a demi-john the gift of a Transylvanian well-wisher, in thanks for a successful intercession to the Virgin, whose icon is a treasure of the monastery. We did not suspect that he harboured a special mission for us.

“You must know that Saint George comes in person to the abbot once or twice a year to see how he is getting on.”

“Very considerate of him.”

“Of course. Two years ago Saint George visited the abbot and said he must make wine for King Charles of England. You know Saint George loves England too,” said Father George.

“Oh yes. His flag is everywhere.”

“On churches.”

“On football shirts.”

“But he is Prince Charles. Not King.”

“A great country must have a King,” said Father George.

“We have a Queen.”

“Of course but that is a woman. The ruler should be a man. Byzantium had two emperors. England can have a King and a Queen.”

“Fair enough.”

“The abbot gave me the blessing to help him make the wine for King Charles as I am in charge of the cellar. We had a novice to help us. The three of us picked the best grapes with our hands. We pressed it down here. See, there is the press. And there is the barrel. It is ready now. It is organic for the health of the King.”

“Do you use sulfites? Or do you rack it?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Father George.

How do you stop the fermentation?”

“Of course when wine gets to fourteen degrees it kills all the bacteria and the fermentation stops. You must taste.”

Father George picked up a glass jug, rinsed it under the tap and took it over to a 100 litre wooden cask lying on its side with a crown chalked on the front. It had been tapped and Father George turned the spigot. This was not going to be pleasant. I have experience of wine-making. With my friend Panayis we made 5-600 litres a year in my cellar in South London with grapes from Covent Garden Market. I suspected this would be strong as sherry and tasting of dead mouse with hints of camel urine and fartleberry. Father George filled our glasses and invited us with a flourish to sup the royal brew. After sniffing, holding up to the light, a loyal toast to Charles, England and Saint George, anything to put off the moment of truth, we steeled ourselves not to pucker and sipped the littlest of sips. Then swigged. Swigged again. Held out our glasses for more. It was excellent.

“You must take it to the King,” said Father George.

“How, Father? How do we get that barrel to London? Through the customs of several countries? We can’t take it on a plane. You need a shipping company.”

“We have tried. They will not take it. It is not certified. You must help us. The abbot is most anxious. What will he say to Saint George? Take some bottles.”

“We can’t turn up at King Charles’s palace with bottles of home-made wine. Monastery made, I mean. They have security. They’ll want to know what’s in it.”

“Of course. Wicked people wish to poison the King. That is normal. We will send a letter with the seal of the abbot. When the butler opens the door of the palace you will give the wine to him and he will taste it before he gives it to the King.”

He looked so expectant, so imploring. He was under pressure from his boss and his boss’s boss, Saint George.

“We can take two bottles each. That’s all we are allowed.”

Relief and happiness flooded over Father George’s face. He chose eight dark green bottles from a bin of empties and gave them a good rinse. He opened a new packet of corks and dragged out a floor-standing corker. We gathered round the spigot and filled the bottles, with hearty tastes to make sure the quality was consistent. Each of us had a turn corking two bottles and took photos to prove it. Father George found a roll of yellow masking tape and a felt-tip to make labels that he wrote out in elegant ecclesiastical script. Finally we tore up cardboard boxes for packaging that we sealed with the tape. 

Two months later three of us turned up at Clarence House, Prince Charles’s official residence, to deliver the wine to his private office. They were kindly received by some very senior staff and a letter of thanks signed by His Royal Highness was sent to the abbot. I hope somebody got to drink the wine. It was rather good. 

Into The Tomb

One of Evia’s most ancient monuments, a Bronze Age Mycenaean beehive tomb, is half an hour from our house. It’s outside the village of Katakalos beside a dirt road skirting a valley. 

There are no signs, fences, information boards, just two rusty metal poles on the side of the road.

The Mycenaean civilisation flourished three and a half thousand years ago. It takes its name from the city of Mycenae on the mainland of southern Greece, famous for its king Agamemnon, who led the Greeks in the war against Troy and was murdered in the bath by his wife Clytemnestra when he got home.

The Evian tomb is a smaller version of the cavernous one in Mycenae but still the genuine article, a bronze age relic from the age of Odysseus on our doorstep.

After half a day of searching on Harley, my old and trusty motorbike, I find the entrance. I’d driven past it twice thinking it was a sheep pen. A wicket gate guards a tunnel into the hillside. Undo a couple of turns of wire, stoop, and by the light of my phone creep into the musty dark.

After half a day of searching on Harley, my old and trusty motorbike, I find the entrance. I’d driven past it twice thinking it was a sheep pen. A wicket gate guards a tunnel into the hillside. Undo a couple of turns of wire, stoop, and by the light of my phone creep into the musty dark. 

After twenty feet or so it opens up into a stone clad beehive chamber fifteen feet wide and fifteen tall at its apex. It’s shored up with beams inside to stop it falling in. 

A storm of bats fans my face and ruffles my hair. I drop the phone, lens down, and scrabble in the dark and bat guano. Homer sings in the Odyssey about gibbering souls of the dead like bats sped by Hermes into hell. I see what he means as I flee the realm of death into the day. 

I wipe bat shit off my phone on the grass and look over a rumpled landscape of olive orchards to a gleam of sea. People who once stood here might have watched Homer’s Greek fleet cruising up the gulf on its way to Troy. Or imagined it. As I do.

A Rough Guide to Setines (aka Athens)

Nicola Martoni, a little, short-sighted, middle aged provincial lawyer from Southern Italy, arrived in mainland Greece in February 1395. He had been on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and was struggling to get home to Carinola, a small town 60 kilometres north of Naples. He spent two days in Setines, some of which he spent seeing the sights. His diary contains the earliest medieval description we have of the city. 

Setines was one of the names for Athens coined by the ruling Franks, the medieval name in the eastern Mediterranean for western Europeans. It is a contraction of εις Αθήνα - eis Athena - in or at Athens. (The name Istanbul has a similar origin, ‘eis stin poli’, in the city.)

The history of Frankish Setines began in 1204 when the valiant knights of the Fourth Crusade gave up on the Holy Land and sacked Constantinople. They replaced the Byzantine emperor with a Catholic one of their own. The land grab that followed resulted in several competing principalities within the new Latin Empire. The Burgundian knight Otto de la Roche was granted Attica and Boeotia to create the Duchy of Athens. 

Otto set about replicating the western European feudality he had grown up with. Latins were the lords. Greeks were the serfs. They had no right to own, sell, buy, leave or inherit property. They were not allowed to hold military or public office. The Orthodox archbishop was banished. Greeks could practise their religion but the clergy answered to a Catholic archbishop supported by an influx of Cistercian monks. The official languages were French and Latin.

Acropolis with the Frankish Tower
James 'Athenian' Stuart 1782

If Greeks thought the French were oppressive, worse was to come. In 1311 the Great Catalan Company of mercenaries defeated the Burgundians and made the Duchy of Athens their home for the next forty-five years. The official language was changed to Catalan. In 1388, seven years before Martoni arrived, Nerio Acciaiuoli, from a Florentine banking family, captured Athens from the Catalans. To win the support of his Orthodox subjects and Byzantine neighbours he changed the official language back to Greek, employing Greek scribes and officials. He learned Greek, took a Greek mistress and appointed Greeks as ‘elders’ to advise on government. An Orthodox Archbishop was allowed back into the city for the first time since 1204, although he had to make do with a church in the lower town as the Parthenon church remained Catholic.

Nerio died in in September 1394, the year before Martoni arrived. He bequeathed Athens and its revenues to the Parthenon church to replace riches he had looted from it and to employ twenty priests to pray for his soul. The Orthodox Archbishop, incensed that Athens was now the property of the Catholic clergy, invited Turks into the lower town. Besieged on the Acropolis the Florentine governor appealed for help to the Venetians of Negropont, the name given to the island of Euboea and its capital. They sent an army to evict the Turks and took over the city.

This was the situation when Martoni arrived in Attica. He travelled by night to avoid bands of Italians, Catalans, Turks, Albanians and unaffiliated brigands. But the city was peaceful under its Venetian garrison and he took the opportunity for a spot of sightseeing. From the evidence of the stone blocks and columns lying around, his first impression is that Athens must have been a great city at the time of the Emperor Hadrian. Then it was destroyed by the Trojans and reduced to the area around the castle. Trojans? Later he describes a relic from Homeric Troy so he may have mixed up his historical periods, not for the first time. Or he was using Trojan as one of the popular names of the time for Turks and other invaders from the east. The actual culprits were the Heruli, a Germanic tribe from the Black Sea, who destroyed the city in AD 267.

After settling in he asks some locals to show him round. They take him to ‘Aristotle’s School’, passing two handsome fountains where students imbibed wisdom with the water. His guides conjured the school out of the ruins. It is built of marble, twenty feet long and sixteen feet wide. It was roofed with marble architraves and entablatures above them. The whole building around and overhead was decorated with various reliefs in gold and other beautiful colours. Traces of decoration can be seen at both ends of the room. Outside the door are porticos with columns supporting marble architraves and entablatures, sculpted and painted in gold, where Aristotle used to stroll to relax when he was tired of studying.

A stroll in the cloisters is a faded memory of the Peripatetics. What they are in fact admiring is the remains of the reservoir at the end of the Hadrian’s aqueduct. It is now the ‘Dexamini’ in Kolonaki at the foot of Mount Lycabettos, where water is blessed on January 6. The actual Lyceum was destroyed by the Romans in 86 BCE.

Our tourist follows his guides to the imposing palace of the Emperor Hadrian, where he miscounts the twenty remaining columns and their architraves. Hadrian certainly dedicated it and doubtless admired the several statues of himself. As Martoni pictures the great emperor sitting in state he is not to know it was the Temple of the Olympian Zeus, left in ruins by the Heruli and a handy source of marble for their successors. 

A couple of minutes walk away is Hadrian’s Arch. Martoni compares it with the entrance to the tower of Capua, his provincial capital. It is not as high but nevertheless impressive. The Panathenaic Stadium he takes to be a Field of Mars, where soldiers from the nearby barracks trained for battle. Echoes may have come down of gladiatorial contests from Roman times.

Walled-up Propylaea 1770

The high point of the tour is the Castro. The wide Roman steps up to the Propylaea and the great gateway through which the Panathenaic procession passed are closed off. The way in is along a narrow path to the east of the Nike bastion near the modern entrance. He peeks inside the walled-off Propylaea, now the great hall of the Ducal Palace, and admires the columns and massive architraves. 

He is more amazed  at the sixty columns of the Parthenon, higher, would you believe, than ladders used for harvest at home in Carinola. Saint Dionysius the Areopagite was chained to one of them during the Passion of Christ. When all the buildings of the world shook in the resulting earthquake he realised either the world is coming to an end or the Son of God will suffer, and traced the sign of the cross on the marble with his fingers, where it was still to be seen. This is the tour guide’s version of the story in the Acts of the Apostles in which Dionysius was overawed in Egypt by a solar eclipse on the first Good Friday. It was another fifty years before he was converted to the cross by Saint Paul. By then he was a judge in the court of the Areopagus - hence his sobriquet.

Inside the temple is the church of Saint Mary, as large as the church in Capua. The massive entrance doors were salvaged from the ruins of Troy when it was destroyed by the Greeks. In the first of its two naves is the first altar in the world, made by Saint Dionysius after his conversion. The altar in the second nave has four massive jasper columns twelve feet high. In a crack in the wall is a light that never goes out, believed to be a saint’s last resting place. Kill-joy seventeenth century travellers reported that it was a translucent stone set in the masonry. In a side chapel is a painting of Our Lady made from life by Saint Luke. Another priceless treasure is a book of all the gospels written in Greek in Saint Helena of Constantinople’s own hand. 

The custodians show them a collection of saintly body parts including an arm bone of Saint Denis of France. What is it doing here? Since the ninth century Dionysius and Denis have been confused, sharing the story of their martyrdoms. Dionysius was thought to have gone to Rome where he was beheaded under Diocletian, the same fate as befell Denis. He/they continued preaching, carrying around their head(s). Although the conflation was disproved as early as the sixteenth century and they are commemorated separately by Orthodox and Catholics, it is still promoted by online hagiographies.

Finally Martoni tells us about two great columns said to have supported a marvellous shrine containing a statue so powerful that, in those days, if enemy vessels approached, however far out to sea they appeared, the statue sank them. But if they were well-intentioned the statue did them no harm. There are memories here of the great statue of Athena Prómachos, Athena Leading the Troops, that stood between the Propylea and the Parthenon and could be seen far out to sea. The columns were in fact part of a Roman monument to a father and son, who paid for a civic celebration.

We can smile at Martoni’s credulity and the tour guide’s perennial love of a good story. The main sources of information for most people before printing was the Bible, word-of-mouth, tales and ballads. With little else to go on, misapprehension and confusion is understandable. For example, Martoni sailed upriver from Alexandria to Babylon, the Coptic twin city of Cairo. So he tells us the river is the Tigris. 

Martoni travels through a ‘real’ world of physical exertion, trial and mortal danger.  It is also a world of the imagination that to him is equally as ‘real’. His text makes little distinction between the natural and the supernatural. What appears to us as his gullibility, his credulity, is acceptance of the everyday marvellous. The stone glowing with saintly remains in the Parthenon church? The gates of Troy? The laser-eyed statue? When you have venerated the balsam trees sprung up for Baby Jesus’s smalls to dry on in the Matarea Garden of Cairo or the cross of the Good Thief hovering unsupported in mid-air in its chapel on Cyprus, you take smaller wonders in your stride.

Florentine image of Athens

Some stories have classical roots. Landing in Attica Martoni sees two marble statues of a man and a woman. It is said that he used to be a real man who pursued the woman in order to take her virginity. She fled into the hills, refusing to let him have his way. Seeing she could not escape him, she begged God to turn both of them into marble statues. Her prayer was heard and so they remain to this day.  Arthurian Romance also brought the landscape to life with knightly deeds of derring-do, damsels and dragons. Athenians would have been familiar with Italian ‘cantari’ and similar ballads in Catalan and Greek. Tales feature the first Duke of Athens, Theseus, and his lovely Amazon bride Hippolyta, or Cecrops the founder of the city. 

Dodging Turks and Albanians, Martoni left Setines for Negropont, where he hoped to find a Venetian ship to take him home. He admired the enchanted castle in the middle of the Euripos defended by currents flowing both ways at once, where the enchantress Morgan le Fay imprisoned Sir Gawain for confessing his fling with her dragon-daughter, Ponzella Gaia, to Guinevere. He waited six weeks before coming back to Setines. He has no more to say about Athens, except that he had to cadge a bed in the archbishop’s house as the inns were full. He ran the nocturnal gauntlet of brigandage again by mule and boat to Corinth, held by the Duke of Cephalonia, where he climbed up to Acrocorinth by night to evade Byzantine besiegers. After more adventures he got home via Patras, Corfu and Venice. 

Seven years later in 1402 Antonio, the disinherited son of the late Florentine Duke Nerio, regrouped his forces and evicted the Venetians. Supported by Ottomans, his dynasty held Setines until 1460 when they bowed to the inevitable and surrendered its stories to the Turks, who reverted to the more classical Atina.

This appeared in Argo, A Hellenic Review, Autumn 2020