Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor

before entering with the wish that the newcomer might live and open the way for others to follow. Figs and raki from Kalamata were offered to the guests in his honour. With girls it was the opposite. There were neither gifts nor rejoicing nor congratulations; they were only useful as gun-breeders and drudges and dirge-singers. There are no dowries; the groom’s family provides the house and its gear and donkey-loads of grain. A sun is carved or painted on the cradle of a baby boy, a moon on that of a little girl.
    There are no panagyria (those joyful rustic kermesses that celebrate saints’ days in the rest of Greece), no singing or dancing. Like all south-eastern Europe, the gloomy passion for virginity reigns supreme, a prize reserved for a loveless match, and the usual bloodthirsty sanctions for infidelity prevail. Understandably, it seldom occurs. Only men are mourned at their death, but women wear black for even their remotest male relations. The women’s life is one of constant toil—in the house or the fields, at the olive press or at neolithic handmills which are a sort of unwieldy pestle and mortar. They set off to reap far-away corn patches, sickle in hand, their wooden emblematic cradles slung papoose-like from their shoulders. When the cisternsdry up in summer, they trudge for miles with kegs on their backs to fill with brackish water near the sea at one of the half-dozen trickles of the Deep Mani. The maledictions of the Mani are supposed to be the bitterest and the most effective in Greece.
    Life, in fact, is wretchedly poor and overcast with sadness. In the past it was entirely shadowed by the blood feud. The thing that kept the Maniots going was their fierce sense of liberty, their pride in living in one of the earliest places in Greece to have cast free of the Turks. It is very seldom that a Maniot enters domestic service. Maniot beggars are unknown. Cattle theft does not exist, and doors are never locked. It is part of their regional pride that prompts them to dismiss the inhabitants of the outside world as “Vlachs.” At last I learnt the meaning of the word which had so puzzled me the day we arrived in the Mani! It has nothing to do with the nomads of the Pindus. A Vlach is a plain-dweller, a descendant of rayahs , a vile bourgeois , and Maniots who leave the peninsula to live like them are said, with accents of scorn, to have “gone Vlach.”
    It is a life of bitter hardship. One last superstition is very moving. If a woman has lost a male child (a “gun”), she carries her next-born son out into the street in her apron shouting, “A lamb for sale. Who’ll buy a lamb?” “I will,” says the first passer-by. He pays a small sum, stands godfather to him at the font, then hands the lamb back to its mother. It is a ruse to cheat Charon by confusing the familiar track with a false scent.
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    The Nyklian policeman rolled over and awoke under the olive tree, where we had talked ourselves into the blessed somnolence of a siesta, and led us in the cool of the evening along one of those stony lanes that wandered down the slope towards thesea to show us the old church of Michael the Taxiarch, [2] in the minute village of Charouda. The little place was surrounded by positive orchards of prickly pear, some of them growing over twenty feet high: vast branching tangles of green ping-pong bats and of malformed fleshy hands bristling with fierce needles, their rims equipped with half a dozen bulbous thumbs. The church was a little golden basilica standing among cypresses and topped with a brood of cupolas gathered round a central dome. The walls inside were beautifully frescoed, the usual saintly figures evolving across the plaster walls with an elegant and loose-limbed freedom. There are many of these engaging little churches in the Mani. They absorbed all the available grace and piety that existed in the stony breasts of the old Maniots. Occasionally they are