Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor

as we have seen, impelled resistance to the occupation at all costs. It had also bequeathed lawless customs which now wreak havoc among the Cretans themselves. They are virtually weaned on powder and shot; every shepherd goes armed, and a worship of guns and great skill in handling them dominate the highlands. The rustling of flocks, though it is on the wane, still goes on. Marriages sometimes begin by the armed abduction of the bride by her suitor and his friends, and blood feuds, initiated, perhaps, by one of these two causes or by an insult, by rage or an exchange of shots, can decimate opposing families over a space of decades and seal up neighbouring villages in hostile deadlock. Harsh and terrible deeds are done in the name of family honour. The wildness of the country puts these things beyond the reach of the law and fills themountains, even in peacetime, with a scattered population of outlaws; in war, when all shadow of authority except the hostile and impotent writ of the enemy was swept aside, lawless ways doubly prospered. In spite of the occupation, in which these mountaineers were so resolute and determined, private vengeance (especially in Sphakia and Selino) laid many villagers low.
    All this is confined to a few regions and it is on the wane. Obviously, it is the duty of the state to stamp out these fierce customs. Yet I can never hear or read of a Cretan mountaineer being hunted down and brought to book for participating in one of these mountain feuds without a feeling of compunction: the juxtaposition of modern law and those eagle-haunted wildernesses seems somehow as incongruous as the idea of Orestes bundled into a Black Maria. For many of these tragedies are, by age-old standards, innocent; they are prompted by feelings of duty and conducted with honour. [10] There was much to deplore; much more, however, to admire; in particular their courage and the compassion that prompted them to shelter, clothe and feed the straggling army of their marooned allies. For this hundreds of Cretans were killed in reprisal massacres, and scores of villages were burnt to ashes; and, when their protégés were safely spirited away to Africa, their ardour was poured into resistance, and, most mercifully for us, into backing up the handful of foreign emissaries who had been dropped into their midst to help carry on the secret war. It was no mean thing for these solitary allies in their midst to feel that they had the supportof a dozen mountain-ranges and of several hundred villages; indeed, if need be—and there was need, now and then—of the whole island.
    But, apart from these general qualities, so propitious to the struggle which was afoot, it was the detail and the structure of their life—in which we aspired, in speech and manner, to drown ourselves—which invited fascination and respect.
    Little in these crags and ravines had changed for centuries. One felt that each village must have existed since Minoan times. There was little there but a church filled with flaking Byzantine frescoes and a slanting maze of stepped and cobbled lanes; but there were subtle differences in the weave and the pattern of blankets and knapsacks and the way that men tied their fringed head-kerchiefs, and in the cut of their hooded capes, and in some of them, a distinguishing accent, a variant of the Cretan dialect, and even of physical appearance. However often these villages had been sacked and burned they were always built again and according to an unbreakable formula. I remember sitting on the flat roof of a friend’s [11] house in Anoyeia, on the slopes of Mount Ida, and, as I gazed at the moonlit jig-saw of roofs and houses all round, calling to mind Aristotle’s ideal for the capitals of the Greek states: cities small enough to hear the voice of one herald.
    We seldom stayed in villages; not through fear of treachery, but lest innocent garrulity should endanger them. The houses contained little: a semi-circular