Argyro Falirea`s coffin was suspended between two kitchen chairs only a few feet from the bed in which she had been born 83 years before.
Sensing the end was near, some of the villagers a few days before had fetched a wooden casket from the city of Kalamata. Then, after she had breathed her last, Argyro`s kinswomen washed her body, wrapped it in a long, white burial gown and folded her arms around an icon.
Her sons, meanwhile, took the kithia, the village`s mourning bell, from the church storeroom and hung it from the limb of a nearby tree. Pulling on the clapper rope, Adreas and Bangelis Falirea sent the tin-ga ting, tin-ga ting of its pealing out across the mountainside hamlets that make up the village of Exohorio. In that sound, the peasants say, you can hear crying; so they call it ”the bell of tears.”
Working in the olive groves, villagers heard the tolling as it bounced up the sides of Mt. Taigetus, the tallest peak in southern Greece. Tending their goats and sheep on the higher slopes, shepherds picked up the kithia`s faint echoes as well, and turning their flocks around, started down the mountain. On the way back the herdsmen plucked a few sprigs of wild flowers, while the peasants made a similar stop at the beds of gladiolas and peonies with which they border their vegetable gardens.
Entering the Falirea home, most villagers went directly to the casket. Afterward there would be time enough for weeping and for consoling each other, but their immediate task they attended to with dry-eyed focus. One after another, each of the several hundred people with whom Agryro had lived and died, paused to stare down at her for a few moments, as if using their final visit to fix her image permanently in memory. Then they gently placed the flowers inside her coffin.
All that afternoon and evening the blossoms kept coming. Scarlet and yellow, magenta and orange, they slowly built up into a living patchwork quilt that finally lined Argyro`s casket so completely that only her face was exposed. Those who brought roses tucked them one-by-one in a semicircle between her forehead and the fringe of the burial gown where it wound around her head. So it looked as if she, too, was crowned with a halo just like the saint whose image she gripped. By midnight, Argyro herself had been transformed into an icon, sculpted by her fellow villagers out of carnations and iris, daisies and geraniums, whose stalks still dripped the rocky soil of Exohorio`s fields.
It had to be Providence–or Tihi, as Argyro`s neighbors would say–who steered me to her funeral rites. Too many months of staring into a computer terminal, and stalling the lady from MasterCard, had left me eager to be free for a while of modern society`s blandishments and their costs. So recently I redeemed a longstanding ambition to see the Mani region of Greece, a mountainous district that, even more than the rest of the country, has declared itself off limits to civilization.
Or at least so the history books and travelers` accounts claimed. For hundreds of years, they say, the inhabitants of this rocky finger appended to the Peloponesus successfully withstood the efforts of Turks and Nazis alike to conquer them. Supposedly, even the Greek government only belatedly has forced them to recognize the world beyond their own beloved Mt. Taigetus.
For their own kind, the Maniotes are said to reserve a fierce, undying loyalty bred by centuries of defending their craggy villages from a line of would-be invaders that stretches back to antiquity. As they imagine it, from the base of their mountain on, the rest of the world is populated with an undifferentiated mass of barbarians whom they collectively label the
”Vlach,” in memory of nomads whose attacks their ancestors beat off when the Byzantine Empire was still in business.
Could such a latter-day Shangri La really have eluded the long hand of modern society? Or had I delayed my escape too long, and would I find the Mani now crowned with Golden Arches? A hot, bumpy bus ride down from Athens gave me a lot of time to worry through those alternative endings to my fantasy. To that point, it had been sustained by a letter of introduction previously forwarded to Exohorio by a villager whom Tihi had carried to my own native Chicago.
Putting the key to the door of my friend`s ancestral home, I stepped inside, put my bags down and collapsed into a chair. The last leg of my journey–four kilometers up the mountain from Kardamyli, a seaside town directly below Exohorio–had taken the better part of a day to navigate and had left me beyond the point of caring about the respective virtues of civilization versus simpler societies. But after an hour or so`s rest, I went out again to explore my surroundings.
Since I had reached the village during the midafternoon siesta, my arrival had gone unnoticed. But now it was early evening, and as I climbed up and down Exohorio`s steeply inclined lanes, people were waking from their naps and coming out to sit on the tiny balconies that project from their second-story windows. An ancient shepherd woman, using her apron to shoo a couple of goats in front of her, fell in step beside me.
”German?” she asked, as if associating an unaccustomed face with the last outsiders who had tried to force themselves upon her village.
”No,” I replied in my best broken Greek. ”I`ve just now come from America.”
”So you are he, Christos` friend?” she replied, and with that she started stroking my body from chest to knees with great, loving sweeps of her hands. Just the fact that I was a tangible link to a fellow villager of whose presence she had been robbed for many years seemed to make the old woman desperate to absorb my very physical being into her own.
”I told you he`s not German,” she called up to a couple on a nearby balcony, not for a moment taking from my midsection hands as gnarled as the olive trees on the ridge lines below us. ”Christos sent him!”
With that, the couple above divided their forces, the woman moving to a second balcony on the other side of their house so she could relay the answers of my continuing interrogation.
”He`s here!” that woman cried.
”Who?” asked an unseen voice farther up the line.
”From Seekago!” the woman on the balcony replied.
Two simultaneous chains of questions and answers began moving up and down the mountainside, intersecting each other with free-form sequence and logic.
”How is Christos` father? Is he well?”
”Who is here, Christos?”
”He has six children?”
”Christos?”
”No, the xeni.”
By the time the village telegraph had carried that evening`s edition of the daily news across the cluster of roof tops that terrace up Mt. Taigetus`
lower approaches, I had been adopted into the community. No doubt, the process was hastened by the number of my offspring. My answer to that inquiry, reformulated as a question, was sent around the circuit twice over before most folks were ready to admit that they had been wrong in assuming that American families are very different from their own.
Whatever the cause, by the time I had to leave Exohorio, I, too, had been apportioned a share of the communal labor by which the peasants work their fields and maintain the village`s rock-paved streets. On the morning of my departure I was entrusted with a large package of the local herbal tea and instructed to deliver it to our fellow villager in Chicago. Never mind that after leaving Mani, Chris Nikolas had gone on to medical school. To the companions of his mountainside youth, his health had been at risk for all the years he was denied the chance to drink again from Taigetus` life-giving bounty.
It was also as a new-found member of the community that I was personally summoned to the Falirea home, my neighbors assuming that I would not recognize the kithera`s signal. By the time they escorted me there, the wake already had divided on gender lines. In the kitchen of the tiny house, the men were vigorously arguing soccer and the recent Greek elections, making their points between sipping cups of syrupy Greek-style coffee or glasses of wine resinated with juniper berries from the mountain above us. Having paid their floral homage to Argyro, they were content to cede to the womenfolk the
responsibility for conducting the services.
On three sides Argyro`s bedroom was lined with a continuous seam of Exohorio`s widows. Their black dresses and head-scarves–a peasant woman`s unvarying uniform once her husband dies–were outlined against the white-washed walls. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling, as if to demonstrate the village`s tenuous link to the modern world, while the mourning rite itself made it clear that the Mani`s true orientation is quite the opposite.
Through that night and into the next morning the women took turns composing Agryro`s miralogu, or funeral hymn. For an hour at a time, each would compose extemporaneously verse after verse of iambic poetry, every one of them a perfect 15 beats to the line. So after a while the regularity of the sound pattern seemed to wrap itself around the participants, enclosing them in a mutual trance in which all distinctions between the events of the day and their people`s ancient past seemed to dissolve.
For by Exohorio`s collective memory, mankind`s history is but a footnote to its own. Nor do the peasants completely lack for evidence to support such a view. By way of beginning my education, one afternoon my new friends took me to a ledge on the ocean side of the village. There you look directly down to the beach where, in 1820, the Mani`s chieftans pledged themselves to free the rest of Greece from the Turks.
For 400 years those warrior leaders had alternated between keeping the Ottomans out of their own mountains, and conducting blood feuds among themselves of which the Sicilians would be proud. As a matter of fact, the people of Exohorio assert that bendetta is a loan word, carried to Italy by Maniote exiles seeking refuge from one of those civil wars.
But for a moment, at least, the Mani leaders put aside their quarreling and piracy to launch the Greek rebellion. Then after it was successful, they decided that whether it is Greek or Turk, sooner or later every government starts presuming to tell you how to manage your life. So they shut themselves up again behind the protection of their mountain, from which isolation their descendants have only recently been tempted.
At the other end of their history, the peasants of Exohorio see themselves as the direct descendants of the Byzantines, who for 1,000 years subjected the Near East to Greek rule. Textbooks may fail to note it, but the villagers are convinced that after Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, surviving members of the imperial court landed at that same beach just below Exohorio. As they recall it, the emperor chose their tiny corner of the world as a place of refuge where he might await the proper moment to regain his throne.
That ruler had six fingers on one hand, and so a local tradition ever since has predicted the coming of a similarly six-fingered king who someday will lead them back to Constantinople. In 1974, Greece held a referendum to determine the fate of King Constantine II, who had been exiled during the military dictatorship of the previous seven years. Mani was the only district in the country to vote for the king`s return. After all, hadn`t his grandfather been born with six fingers on one hand?
Yet by comparison with the miralogu`s themes, the story of Constantinople`s fall seems mere current events. Like all of Greece, Exohorio is dotted with churches–larger basilicas in the hamlets, tiny, trailside chapels higher up the mountain. But in truth, Christ was a latecomer to this part of the world. Down to the 10th Century, when the rest of Europe long since had been converted, the Maniotes still resisted the New Testament`s message in favor of Homer`s.
During Argyro`s wake, two of her kinswomen sat off to one side carefully sifting grain, and as we left the burial yard the next day each of us was presented with a portion of their labor. ”In case anybody else takes a similar journey,” the women explained, handing me three small pieces of bread. A month later, back in the world of civilization and libraries, I was flipping through ”Bulfinch`s Ancient Mythology,” when the answer to that riddle lept off the page. Crossing the River Styx, Odysseus armed himself with three pieces of bread to throw to Charon`s dog, an animal with a nasty, ankle- biting habit when left unfed.
Through the long hours of the miralogu, Argyro`s companions repeatedly returned to the theme of the underworld`s guardian:
To Charon, a despairing mother screams from the mountain top,
And her song is joined by sons and daughters
Entering the church for their sister`s burial.
What a cruel thief you are, Oh ferryman of the Styx.
Why can`t you be content to rob us of silver and gold?
You don`t seem to want precious stones.
But children from a mother and brother from brother,
These are the things you love to take.
Each black-hooded singer would take a theme such as that, and work and rework it through several versions. With each new elaboration, her emotions would steadily overtake her singing, until she had finally collapsed into a paroxysm of tears. When the next singer took over for her exhausted counterpart, she would often double back to repeat some of her predecessor`s lines, motioning the other women to join her in chanting the verse as a chorus.
At other moments, the miralogu turned to the villagers` belief that the spirits of the dead remain close at hand. In this part of Greece, it is still the practice to exhume a corpse a few years after burial, and bring the bones back home so the departed can continue to share in the life of his household. To that idea, another of Argyro`s mourners spoke, in her poetic specifications for the dead woman`s funeral bier:
Send for the finest stoneworker in all of Kalavrita,
And give him exacting instructions:
Let him make a burial bier with windows wide
So the light of the sun will wake its inhabitant.
And let it have, as well, window sills broad
So the birds will come there and light
And by their chirping bring news of the village
To our beloved who lies there inside.
The people of Exohorio are also painfully aware of another local demographic. While the dead may remain with them, many of the living do not. A generation ago, the village school enrolled 150 students. Now the priest has only five pupils left in his care, since so many young couples have gone off to seek their fortunes abroad. Pointing to a boarded-up house, the villagers will note that the family has moved to America or Australia, then ask: ”Do you understand why? This is a hard life up here, but a beautiful one.”
One time, I inadvertently posed the same rhetorical question myself. An elderly woman was telling me that she had been outside of the village only twice in her life. Once she had gone to Kalamata, another time to Athens, making the latter trip at the urging of her children who now live there.
What was her impression of her nation`s capital, I wanted to know. ”I think it must not be a good place to live,” the old peasant woman replied.
”The houses are so tall, you cannot see the heavens.”
Yet even those villagers who are most baffled by their departed comrades have their own small ways of confessing to civilization`s lure. One couple repeatedly asked me to share their dinner table. The Greek word xeni means
”stranger” and ”guest”; so I never lacked for similar invitations and had to keep postponing that first couple. Then Argyro died, and our evening together had to be set back again. Still, the couple was so insistent that I could see that their invitation had to contain a hidden agenda.
Sure enough, immediately after dinner they took that agenda from a cupboard shelf: Five packages of Kool-Aid mix that a relative had sent them from America. My knowledge of Greek fails long before the verb`s past tense;
so I couldn`t figure out exactly when my friends had received their gift. But the colors on the envelopes had long since faded.
”Is it something to drink?” they asked, pointing to the illustration of a pitcher. ”Can you show us what to do with it?” After I had honored that request, we sampled a glass, and by their expressions you could see that to my hosts` palates, the stuff didn`t measure up to the local vintage. Still, I`d be willing to bet that the next time they entertain their fellow villagers, they will lord it over their guests by serving them ”a famous drink from America.”
That dilemma was much on my mind when Argyro`s sons finally lifted her coffin to their shoulders and carried their mother on her final trip through Exohorio`s streets. At the head of the procession, the village priest swung his censer back and forth perfuming our downhill route to the church, while the rest of the peasants trailed behind the still-open casket. Even the dogs and geese, goats and mules, scampered alongside the funeral parade, which was only fitting. Ask the residents of Pripitsa, the hamlet where Argyro lived, the derivation of its name, and they reply: ”We heard from our fathers that it is Albanian for donkey dung.” Local tradition doesn`t record what inspired the Albanians to come so far to do Exohorio this name-giving favor. But walk a few feet on the village`s streets, and you have to be impressed by the accuracy of their insight.
At the church, the saints were added to the Olympian gods already invoked on the departed`s behalf, and Argyro was ready for interment. But just before the coffin was sealed, the villagers lined up to bid her farewell. One after another, 300 strong, they slowly filed by her casket to cross themselves and plant a goodbye kiss on her forehead. Old men and women, who must have known that soon they would be receiving a similar tribute, stood next to teenagers about to feel the lure of foreign ports, and soon I couldn`t control my tears. Truth to tell, I wasn`t so much crying for Argyro, but at the thought of my own future death. Will Charon someday find me in a flower-covered casket surrounded by the love of my family and neighbors? More likely I`ll lie alone in an intensive-care unit with all sorts of tubes running in and out of my body. Yet for all of modern medicine`s wonders, will those gauges and dials any better mark the moment of my passing than Exohorio`s bell of tears?
Looking at the village`s young people, I was saddened even more by the thought that we probably share a similar fate. I had the impulse to grab them by the collar and yell: Don`t go! But, of course, I did no such thing. It`s foolish to argue with civilization. Given half the chance, who wouldn`t choose comfort over poverty, no matter how picturesque?
Still, I couldn`t shake the feeling that years from now, when Exohorio`s exiles enjoy American affluence–in a tract-home development called Sherwood Forest or some such meaningless name–they will sense that something is missing. Deep in their souls, they will still hunger for a mountainside hamlet called donkey dung, where the peasants faithfuly await a six-fingered king who is to take them home to Byzantium.