A Child of Thetis. Travellers in Greece. An Occasional Series. 6 Christopher Kininmonth

When I visited Phaestos at the end of my stay I felt almost listless as the car swung into view of the southern plain fringed with mountains. I felt its loveliness was swamping my mind and overcharging my imagination. I would be lucky to remember more than a glimpse of it, more than a pulse of the disembodying joy that sweeps the spirit clean. The impact of Crete is a sustained onslaught and stimulation. 

 

I missed summer in Greece this year. But I drew close to the Aegean’s sparkling waters by reading Christopher Kininmonth’s The Children of Thetis: A Study of Islands and Islanders in the Aegean (London: John Lehmann 1949). This is an idiosyncratic piece of travel writing by a little-known writer, who toured the Ionian and Aegean islands between 1937 and the onset of war, and resumed in the mid-1940s after the end of the Nazi Occupation.  Although occasional references to The Children of Thetis can be found in the scholarly literature, little has been written about the author himself. He is an elusive character: he has no entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and I haven’t yet been able to trace any obituaries. He wrote two other pieces of descriptive travel-writing, Rome Alive (1951) and Brass Dolphins: A Description of the Maltese Archipelago (1957), before turning his hand to three mainstream guides, to Sicily (1965), Malta (1967) and Morocco (1972), all in the Travellers’ Guides series published by Jonathan Cape. In the 1970s, he moved on to fiction, publishing two novels: Frontiers (1971) and Maze (1974). 

 

Elements of his life must be pieced together from the dustjackets to his books. He was born in Cheshire in 1917, attended schools in the south of England and Australia, and was educated at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford. He first went to Greece in 1937 and, like so many Englishmen, fell in love with the country. During the war, he served in the Middle East, certainly in Egypt and likely also in Syria. He entered Athens in 1944 along with the troops of liberation. 

 

The Children of Thetis places Kininmonth among that well-known generation of English writers, including Patrick Leigh Fermor and Lawrence Durrell, who came to Greece in the 1930s, were evacuated at the onset of war but gained wartime experience there, and returned afterwards, not least to write about the country. Kininmonth’s travel book about the Aegean is a distillation of his pre-war, wartime and post-war experiences in Greece, and it is often quite hard to understand which periods of Kininmonth’s experiences the narrative refers to. The structure of the book is broadly geographical: there are chapters on Syros, Santorini, Naxos, Aegina, Crete and Ikaria. More thematic chapters cover the lives of islanders, allegedly Dionysiac celebrations, and piracy. The most revealingly personal of the chapters deals with Kininmonth’s participation in the ill-fated attempt to seize the Dodecanese and north-eastern islands in the wake of the Italian armistice in September 1943. 

Kininmonth’s appreciation of the islands is not unmediated. He has clearly read Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi and his acknowledgements include Lawrence Durrell, Theodore Stephanides and George Katsimbalis. He falls recognisably within the thought-world of those Anglo-Americans who, with the aid of powerful Greek cultural figures, ‘discovered’ and substantially invented a model of modern Greece.[1] The opening sentence of The Children of Thetis makes this filiation clear: 'I was nineteen when I discovered Greece and lotus-eating–the intoxication of an immediate and individual enjoyment of the present.'  This is a Greece of sunlight, of glittering seas and mountainous landscapes; a Greece of the dance, the vine, the song, of sensuality and immediacy; a land where physical toil and hardship go hand in hand with vivifying pleasures that are both communal and profoundly individual.   

 

Kininmonth is at his best when entering confidently into this world created by other writers. He writes well about the famous μπουζουκτσής Markos Vamvakaris, whom he seems to have heard on Syros and in the Piraeus, his ‘extraordinary voice…, forced up from his great stomach in agonies of nostalgia’. He is a convincing writer about the pleasures of wine and of male company. There are great accounts of πανηγύρια (festivals) on Naxos and Crete, and Kininmonth associates them, typically, with the Dionysia. Here he is on Naxos:

 

In the village there was a great commotion. At booths, lit by naphtha flares, people were selling sweetmeats, roast chestnuts and sixpenny toys. Large bamboo shelters had been set up and decorated with branches of laurel where wine was served from the barrel. Tables and benches were placed round an open space for dancing. Mules and donkeys were tethered to parked trucks and everywhere there were crowds of excited people. They pushed about fetching drinks for their tables, stopping to greet friends, crowding round a dancer to give him wine or, not able to afford to drink, pressing into the centre of the fun to feel its warmth. Bands of girls wandered happily about. Children played under everyone’s feet. The table tops were wet with spilt wine. The settles, rickety on the uneven ground, tipped up the unwary. Drunks staggered around embracing all and sundry in their happiness. Shouts of provocative laughter came from the girls and the young men peacocked for them.

 

Perhaps his most memorable paragraphs are reserved for descriptions of the dance. Here he is at a household party that unfolds as part of a communal πανηγύρι on Crete:

 

The tempo slips into a higher gear. Carolling with a cracked rapture the old lady twirls with a dance step into the kitchen to refill our glasses. Petros is galvanised into astonishing life. With a whoop of triumph he begins to dance quite beautifully and with amazing agility for his years. Small Stelios, a dark youth with a soft face and big fathomless eyes, quietly joins the old man. Together they dance the butcher’s dance with complete abstraction from us. All the ragged ends of this extraordinary day, the straying, intoxicated wits, the tottering stragglers and shrill excited groups, coming and going in a drunken kaleidoscope, are softly gathered together into this small room. Everything converges in the perfect balance and subtle weaving of these steps made in concord together. The wonderful tune, a dance time that is so ancient that its origins are lost in the past of sacrificial dances, of victory and butcheries of bulls no one remembers, embraces us all in a heavy nostalgia. The last obeisance of the dance is made, the dancers come swiftly up to the poised finish. They drop their hands from one another’s shoulders to turn out of their spell. They smile. Petros thumps the table for “Wine, wine, woman!” –and the village-wide party falls apart again into its drunken gestures.

 

Kininmonth’s is, in essence, a neopagan view of modern Greece. Although he meets and enjoys meeting Orthodox monks, his knowledge of Orthodoxy is vanishingly slight and his generalisations about Greek beliefs, though hardly unique among his generation of English writers, are wide and often far off the mark. We hear too often about Dionysus, about Pan and about the Great Mother –as if all were direct presences untrammelled by the two millennia of Christian experience in Greece. The careful anthropology of a writer such as Juliet du Boulay [2] is a much more reliable guide to the complex archaeological layers of Greek popular religion. 

 

The most unusual chapter – and one which shows Kininmonth thinking the hardest about what island life really is and how it differs from western urban lifestyles – is the most clearly situated. In late October 1943, Kininmonth, who was then stationed in Alexandria, joined the small expeditionary force that was sent to the Dodecanese and north-eastern islands, which, until the Italian armistice of September 1943, had been controlled by Mussolini. The aim was to keep the islands out of German hands. This is the only first-hand account that I have ever read about this expeditionary force and Kininmonth’s description is gripping. His small fleet sailed via Cyprus and Kastellorizo, hoping – forlornly – to save Rhodes. In early November, he landed briefly on Kos, after it had already been taken by the Nazis, and was eventually disembarked on Samos, at what is now called Pythagoreio and was then called Tigani. The Battle of Leros broke out almost immediately and the surrender of that island to the Nazis in mid-November precipitated the evacuation of Samos by the allies. The expedition had proved a fiasco: the last loss of the British and the last victory of the Germans in the Second World War. For Kininmonth the loss of these small islands was strongly felt and he knew that the half-hearted British efforts had exposed the islanders to punitive reprisals. The episode, he said, ‘brutally exposed…the divergence between our ways of thought and those of the islanders’. He sees the western mind as dominated by the habit of generalisation, by majoritarian utilitarianism, by continental scale, and by abstract notions of justice, logic and science. ‘So we get a lack of humanity in our outlook and an admiration of impersonal reason. The circumstances of island life do nothing to force the islanders away from the human and the particular in all their dealings.’ He felt great shame at the British failure.

 

Kininmonth’s voice in this travel narrative is, as I’ve said above, not entirely his own. And yet, in one respect, it appears to be very personally marked. Reading him watching and describing men in physical action – drinking in the tavernas, dancing indoors and out, working the fields and at sea – I gained the strong impression that this was the gay male gaze at play. Kininmonth describes the male body not only with the objectivity of the artist (he was a trained artist), but also with the subjective interest of same-sex attraction: ‘Now, in the terrific heat, the young peasants worked in the fields wearing only light shorts. As the bus passed they were glimpsed like splendid statues conceived with the vision of a Michelangelo. As they drove their animals with the slowness of summer, their sun-burned skin had the bloom of ripe fruit so that each looked like a Creteus or Thammuz at peak of his season.’ The likelihood that Kininmonth can reasonably be considered a gay writer is substantially strengthened by a reading of his first novel, Frontiers, published four years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England. This is an unusual, overwrought fiction, set during the Second World War and informed by Kininmonth’s war-time experiences in Egypt and the Middle East, and by his pre-war travels in Greece. It is unashamedly sensual and gay, often outrageously orientalist, sometimes markedly distasteful. Its main character, Fleming, is a more-or-less openly gay Hellenist, presumably modelled on Kininmonth himself:

 

As all its lovers are, Fleming was engrossed with Greece. Its present pain was something he carried about with him as he did his regrets for home. He had spent much time in the country during the last years before the war, when it had been a good place to be very young in. It had not then been like everywhere else in Europe, hell bent on destruction. Where, in Greece, he had found life and every good thing gladly welcomed, profoundly appreciated, elsewhere these were feared, grudged and spoiled with cruelties. Had he not found Greece, he doubted whether he would have learned really to desire life, and as it was they could kill him now with their lunatic war if they must, but he could not die one of life’s paupers.

 

It seems then that we can place Kininmonth not only among the ‘mainstream’ writers such as Durrell, Leigh Fermor and Miller, who ‘discovered’ and invented Greece in the 1930s, but also among those who found in the Greece of the interwar years a form of liberation away from England’s punitive laws on homosexuality. Such writers included the poet William Plomer, the critic Robert Liddell, the archaeologist Francis Turville-Petre and the friends he attracted, including Christopher Isherwood, to his experimental lifestyle on the island of St Nicholas off Evia; the novelist Evelyn Waugh too can, with reservations, be included among this number. This separate genealogy of Kininmonth as a writer can, in fact, be traced in The Children of Thetis, the acknowledgements of which include mention of Turville-Petre, Liddell and ‘in a category by himself, though embracing all, Thanos Veloudios’.[3] David Roessel has outlined some of the characteristics of these writers in his magnificent In Byron’s Shadow, but Kininmonth is, I think, a worthy addition to the list.[4] This group of writers would surely benefit from being considered in depth as a whole. They are an important and very particular part of the English imaginary’s investment in Greece.

 

John Kittmer

Scarborough

22 October 2024

 

[1] This world is accessibly explored in Edmund Keeley, Inventing Paradise: The Greek Journey 1937-47 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).

[2] See Juliet Du Boulay, Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village (Limni: Denise Harvey, 2009).

[3] On Thanos Veloudios, see Francis King, Yesterday Came Suddenly (London: Constable, 1993), 142-144 (I am grateful to David Roessel for this reference). It is worth noting that it was the gay publisher John Lehmann who took and published The Children of Thetis. Lehmann’s lifelong interest in Greece had been spurred by his meeting the gay Greek poet, Dimitrios Capetanakis, in 1941. This friendship directed Lehmann’s attention to George Seferis and his literary circle. He travelled to Greece in 1946 and engaged there with the foremost men of letters. (See John Lehmann, In My Own Time: Memoirs of a Literary Life (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969), 294-297, 438-446.) Lehmann would go on to publish Capetanakis, Seferis and Kazantzakis, as well as gay writers such as Gore Vidal. His interest in Kininmonth’s travel-writing is surely doubly motivated. 

[4] David Roessel, In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (Oxford: OUP, 2002), esp. 245-252.

Missionary travel. Travellers in Greece. An Occasional Series 5. Samuel Sheridan Wilson

The woods and forests of Greece abound with wild boars, jackals, hares, wolves, wild cats, lynxes and chamois; whilst the principal feathered tenants of her sylvan groves and mountain glens are finches, nightingales, eagles, owls and falcons. The surface of this lovely land is richly covered and adorned with waving corn, Indian maize, olive-grounds, vineyards, orange groves, and almond, mulberry and other fruit trees. And, as if to give a fine finish to every enclosure, the fields are fenced with laurel, roselaurel, dogrose, aloes and geraniums. The pastures are numerous, and well stocked with flocks of sheep and goats. These are attended by shepherds in arms, boys in rags, or girls in rustic finery; and give additional life and interest to the green hills and sunny vales, over which they are scattered. Over all this vegetation and life, is spread a sky generally fair, and blue and serene; and although occasionally the thunder peal will disperse the affrighted cattle, the nipping frost compel the native to draw the thick capote over his brawny shoulders, and copious showers descend to water the earth; yet the sun smiles during the greater portion of the year.

The author of this bucolic piece, Samuel Sheridan Wilson, made several visits to Greece between 1824 and 1835. Even in his time he must have seemed an unusual man; that is surely even truer nearly two centuries later. Born in Manchester in 1797, he was ordained a minister of the Congregational Church (a dissenting Protestant denomination, which in England now forms part of the United Reformed Church) and from 1819 was posted to Malta by the London Missionary Society, an arm of the Congregational Church, with the task of strengthening the Society’s mission to Greece. On returning to England in 1835, he became pastor of the Congregationalists in Shepton Mallet in Somerset and spent the rest of his life there, dying in 1866. In 1839, he published a memoir of his time in Malta and Greece: A Narrative of the Greek Mission; or Sixteen Years in Malta and Greece, including Tours in the Peloponnesus, the Aegean and the Ionian Isles; with Remarks on the Religious Opinions, Social Habits, Politics, Language etc. [London: John Snow, 1839].[1] It is a remarkable account, not just of Wilson’s missionary activities in Malta and Greece, but also of Greece itself during the revolutionary years.

 

Wilson’s memoir was, in his own words, ‘drawn up for general readers…present[ing] no dry statistics, but incident, narrative and detail’. It is undoubtedly a lively, readable and, in many places, surprising story. The first 180 or so pages deal with Wilson’s arrival in Malta in 1819 and the roughly five years he spent there preparing for the Greek mission. Britain took Malta from the French in 1800 and its possession of the island had been recently confirmed in the treaties that closed the Napoleonic wars. The attachment of the Maltese islands to the British Empire brought Protestantism in all its forms to what was a Catholic people. The opening chapters of the travel memoir show Wilson to have been rabidly anti-Catholic, with a fierce hatred of monastics and Jesuits, and a highly sectarian conviction about the righteousness of the cause of the reformed churches. But for all his efforts at proselytising the Maltese – efforts which caused several skirmishes with the Papal authorities and the local population – Wilson did not lose sight of the fact that he was in Malta to help the Congregationalists’ missionary efforts in Greece and Asia Minor. He worked hard to acquire – from the small Greek population of Valletta – a good working knowledge of demotic Greek and he used this to notable effect. 

 

The final 400 pages of his memoirs are a composite account of his various travels to Greece, together with a summary of the activities in Asia Minor (which he seems himself not to have visited) of the London Missionary Society (LMS), often alongside missionary agents of US Protestant denominations and of the Anglican Church. He visited the Ionian Islands, then under the British Protectorate, in the first half of 1824. As the year closed, he left Malta again for Greece, catching sight of Cape Matapan on 23 December 1824. He spent time on Milos, Spetses, Hydra and Kea, before reaching the mainland at Porto Rafti on the east coast of Attica. From there, he journeyed to Athens and then went onwards to Corinth, Nafplio, Tripoli, Pyrgos, Katakolo and Zakynthos. He was back in Malta in April 1825, after some four months of travels. The memoirs are unclear about the timing of his subsequent visits to independent Greece, but he was clearly in Athens again under the reign of King Otto, probably in 1834/5, shortly before he returned home to England.

 

But why was the LMS launching a religious mission to Greece? The simple reality is that the Congregationalists, unlike the Anglicans and Episcopalians, saw Greece as a fertile ground for proselytism.[2] They knew that the Orthodox Church had not been reformed, as had the churches of NW Europe, and still showed many of the traditional religious stances associated by the reformers with Roman Catholicism, though Wilson consistently viewed Orthodox priests as more friendly to the reformed cause and less pernicious than their Catholic brethren.[3] From 1813 onwards, the LMS sent a succession of its Ministers to Malta, bound for the Ionian Islands. When Wilson arrived on Malta in 1819, the Rev. Isaac Lowndes had recently set sail from there for Corfu, where he would work very closely with the British authorities on educational matters as inspector of schools. On the Ionian Islands, the British authorities, with active support of the missionaries, were looking to establish elementary schools for boys and girls, on the so-called Lancasterian principle, by which the older pupils were taught enough to pass on their learning to the younger pupils. This emphasis on education – particularly on the education of girls – is probably the most remarkable and admirable aspect of the Protestant missions. On mainland and insular Greece and in Asia Minor the LMS worked with comparable US missions and the Anglicans to found elementary schools and spread literacy, irrespective of gender. 

 

         The dissemination of the Greek Bible was central to these efforts. On his travels in Greece, Wilson gave away and sold hundreds of copies of the New Testament in Greek, printed on the Society’s press in Malta; there was huge demand for this among the Greek priesthood and laity. In Asia Minor, these efforts were aided by the interdenominational British and Foreign Bible Society. Back in Malta in the second half of 1825, Wilson took sole charge of the Society’s press. Under his leadership, some sixty titles were printed and issued within a decade. Examples included Wilson’s own Anglo-Greek Primer[4], his Greek translation of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, tracts by Chrysostom, translations of Isaac Watts’s hymns, Psalms in verse, Protestant apologetics and biographies, and so on. It was a Stakhanovite labour of love and Wilson, aided by his Greek friends on Malta, was the Society’s principal translator, working in a variety of genres and registers.

 

Wilson’s account of his travels is not only interesting because of his religious mission. It also shines as a travelogue. Wilson had his eyes open to new places, unknown customs and new experiences. As a Christian missionary, he was not so much interested in the classical world as in the proto-Christian world: the journeys of the apostles and the lives of their first European disciples. Wilson followed the footsteps of St Paul in Athens and Corinth as closely as the poor state of archaeological knowledge then allowed (his confusion of the Pnyx with the Areopagus was total).[5] Though scarcely Byronic in habits or tastes, he had a sometimes romantic sense of the decay of Greece’s antique glories into its contemporary poverty and was impressed by the first signs of recovery under the Bavarian monarchy in the early 1830s. He noticed and recorded carefully the landscapes over which he passed. And he observed the people closely, giving fascinating accounts of their social and domestic lives. He wrote well about marriage customs, Greek hospitality (“On entering, we leave our shoes, generally at the edge of the carpet, lay our right hand on the left breast, bow to the company, say ‘καλ’ ημέρα σας, good day,’ and seat ourselves à la tailor on the divan. The master of the house pronounces some compliment…”)[6], women’s costumes and make-up, the evil eye and other superstitions.

 

Above all, Wilson was excited, as liberal westerners were, by the outbreak of Greek revolutionary fervour in 1821. He was indeed entranced by the prospect of the revival of Greece as a Christian state: 

 

To draw public attention to Greece and to attract the footsteps of the philanthropist towards the land of Basil, the cradle of science, the former scene of apostolic labour, is the object of this volume. She was then filing her chains, and soon she snapt them, to the astonishment of all in Malta. Now was the crisis of Greece. Now the moment of her transit, a transit either to formalism and infidelity, or to light and piety, as Christians in the west might neglect her fate, or direct her course.[7]

 

Travelling to Greece in 1824/5, Wilson had to show considerable courage as he passed through the theatres of war, but he also had the opportunity to meet key figures in the revolution. On Spetses he met Bouboulina. On Hydra, he actually lodged with admiral Miaoulis. In Napflio he met Mavrocordato. In Athens he was received cordially by the Governor (though Wilson wondered if he might be mistaken for a spy) and called on the Bishop. He appears to have met people fearlessly and in full confidence of his rights to be in Greece and to be playing a specific role.

 

        But perhaps most amazingly of all Wilson wrote and published a novel in Greek before he returned to England. His memoirs imply that he wrote it first in English as The Rumeliot Chieftain, but the English manuscript has never been found or published, and the novel exists only in Wilson’s Greek translation, as Το παλληκάριον.[8] It was printed on the LMS press in Malta in 1835 and anonymously published; it is one of the very earliest examples of a Greek novel and is something of a mess (mistakes were clearly made in the translation and printing processes).[9] But as an important curiosity, it was most recently reprinted in 1990 with a scholarly introduction by Dimitrios Polemis.[10] Surely the most eccentric and unexpected legacy of English non-conformist missionary activity.

 

Wilson is undoubtedly a challenging travelling companion. Opinionated and bigoted (while often ignorantly decrying as bigoted the opinions of others), he can appear preposterous (I laughed out loud at his absurd attempts to brow-beat hard-pressed, intellectually and materially impoverished Orthodox clergy and religious into accepting the hair-splitting subtleties of his exposition of substitutionary atonement) and was frequently obtuse about much that is glorious and beautiful in Greek Orthodox tradition; but he undoubtedly liked the Greeks, he worked harder than most of my compatriots then or since to learn and master the language, he was open to Greek experience and Greek customs, and, when all is said and done, he invested sixteen years of his life to spread knowledge among the Greeks of the Gospel in Greek. His memoirs deserve an audience.

 

John Kittmer

Easter 2023

 

NOTES

 

[1] The book has been digitised and is available in print-to-order paperback from the British Library Historical Print Collections.

[2] On the Anglican and Episcopalian decision not to proselytise in Greece, see the chapter by M. Nestlehutt (‘The Development of the Anglican Chaplaincy in Athens’) in L.W. Doolan (ed.), Opening the Doors: A View into the Historic Tradition and Current Life of St Paul’s Church Athens (Athens: St Paul’s Church, 2022), particularly 29. 

[3] See, e.g., Wilson, 204: “We had not been long in the Greek mission, ere we discovered that it had a character all its own. The wants and the supplies, the evils and the antidotes of Greece, differ much from those of heathen nations. It was ours to minister to a mind diseased indeed, but not to any great extent infidel. We had to combat with Christianity paganised, with semi-heathenism baptised with the Christian name; with the errors and vices, the dogmas and sophistries of Platonists, Pharisees, and old Numidian monks, under a visor.”

[4] S.S. Wilson, The Anglo-Greek Primer, or First Step to a Practical Knowledge of the English and Greek Languages. Το Αγγλο-Ελληνικόν αλφαβητάριον, ήτοι πρώτον βήμα προς μιαν εύπρακτον γνώσιν των Αγγλικών και Γραικικών Γλωσσών (Malta: London Missionary Society Press, 1829).

[5] Wilson, A Narrative, 434-6. 

[6] Wilson, op.cit., 296f.

[7] Wilson, op.cit., 86.

[8] Wilson, op.cit., 370.

[9] See R. Beaton, An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature (Oxford: OUP, 1999²), 57.

[10] S.S. Wilson, Το παλληκάριον, edited and introduced by D.I. Polemis (Athens: Idryma Kosta kai Elenis Ourani, 1990).

The Great Forty Days

As often happens, Lent began this year a few days earlier in the western rite than it did in the Orthodox. But all Christians who follow the Gregorian calendar are now, I think, keeping Lent. My first experiences of Greece, 39 years ago, are inseparable from my first experiences of Orthodox Lent, Holy Week and Easter. Those celebrations, in 1984, impressed and, indeed, overawed me, forming indelible memories and sparking what has proved a lifelong interest in Orthodoxy and in the ecumenism of eastern and western Christianity.

Each year, I love tracking the – sometimes similar, sometimes starkly contrasting – customs and traditions marked by Christians of the Orthodox and western rites. Carnival, taking place in the three weeks before Lent, is not important here in the UK, but over the years I have celebrated it in Catholic lands and in Greece. While I was still eating meat (I became a pescatarian several years ago), Τσικνοπέμπτη / Tsiknopempti, which takes place in Greece on the second Thursday in Carnival, was always a great joy: a feast to be enjoyed with friends around a brimming table. ‘Tsikna’ in Greek denotes the smell of roasting or grilling meat and 'Pempti' is Thursday, so the closest equivalent in western Christianity to this day of feasting is Mardi Gras (‘Fat Tuesday’), known to English tradition as Pancake Day or Shrove Tuesday, which happens on the eve of Lent, when traditionally the last eggs and dairy products were eaten before the start of the great fast. 

 

Kites flying on the edge of Philopappou Hill, Lent 2022

Last year, I celebrated the start of Lent twice: doing Ash Wednesday, the start of western Lent, here in Scarborough and Καθαρά Δευτέρα / Kathara Deftera (‘Clean Monday’), the start of Orthodox Lent, in Athens. The weather in Athens on that day was fine and I watched the traditional kite-flying on Philopappou Hill, before having an equally traditional seafood lunch on Mercouri Square in Petralona. This year, I was able to mark the start of Lent only once: on Ash Wednesday, when I took part in the Sung Mass at my local parish church of St Martin’s on the Hill, Scarborough.

 

The liturgical and musical traditions of Lent are profoundly moving, in whatever rite one celebrates. For Anglicans and Catholics, the singing of the Lent Prose (‘Hear us, o Lord, have mercy upon us’) or of Allegri’s great setting of Psalm 51 (‘Miserere mei, Deus’ / ‘Have mercy on me, o God’) and the imposition of the ashes of the previous year’s palms are signs that one has passed out of ordinary and into sacred time. When I was serving as ambassador in Athens, I tried always to go at least once or twice every Lent to hear the singing of the great Χαιρετισμοί της Θεοτόκου, the Salutations to the Mother of God, which are sung sequentially every Friday in Lent, until the whole is performed on the fifth Friday in Lent as the ΑκάθιστοςΎμνος / the Akathist Hymn, the 'hymn for which no one sits’. The glories of our musical and liturgical traditions in Lent are magnificent scene-setters for the great outpouring of words, music and devotion in Holy Week.

 

All of these rites, traditions and practices help us, I think, to mark out sacred time and to keep Lent properly. The Anglican rites for Ash Wednesday are very clear about what is required. We are encouraged ‘to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word’. I owe my own understanding of the practice of fasting to my Greek Orthodox friends, whose discreet and careful Lenten habits impressed me greatly when I was living in Athens. Fasting and self-denial are not only, of course, practices for the disciplining of the self; they are supposed also to lead to ‘almsgiving’, the practice of looking after and taking care of others. Above all, Lent as a preparation for Holy Week and Easter is an annual opportunity to meditate closely on the life of Christ, to align ourselves deliberately and in conviction with what the faith requires of us. We are fortunate indeed if we are able to do this as members of an active congregation, a worshipping community. To all who are observing Lent this year, I wish you a Holy Lent: Καλή Σαρακοστή. 

 

John

3 March 2023

Marie Spartali Stillman – Three Anglo-Hellenic Graces – Scarborough

Marie Spartali Stillman (self-portrait)

I was delighted to learn earlier this week that English Heritage are to instal a Blue Plaque in honour of the memory of Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927) “at the house where she first began to realise her ambition of becoming a painter” (this is presumably the Spartali family home, known as The Shrubbery, now situated behind St Barnabas’s Church on Clapham Common North Side).[1] Spartali Stillman was born into a prosperous family of London Greeks in the middle of the nineteenth century. Her father, Michael, was one of the heads of Spartali & Co., an import business, and served for several years as the Greek consul-general in London.  

Spartali Stillman became associated at an early age with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Introduced to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1864, she sat for him and, telling him that she herself wanted to learn to paint, took lessons from Ford Madox Brown. From 1867, she started to exhibit her work professionally, while continuing to model – for Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and John Spencer Stanhope among others. In 1871, she married the American Pre-Raphaelite painter and journalist, William James Stillman. The last retrospective of her work was at the Delaware Art Gallery in 2015/16 [2]. 

 

Spartali Stillman is being honoured, of course, in her own right. But in the London Greek community of the day, she was simply the most talented of three cousins who were closely associated and collectively known as ‘the Three Graces’ because of their striking beauty and presence and their role as models and muses for the Pre-Raphaelite artists of the second generation. Alongside Spartali Stillman, Maria Zambaco (née Kassaveti) (1843-1914) was the mistress and model of Edward Burne-Jones; Aglaia Koronio (née Ionidi) (1834-1906) was one of William Morris’s great confidantes.[3] All three were artists. In this last year, I have found myself increasingly thinking about their milieu because of the church in which I am now worshipping: St Martin’s on the Hill in Scarborough. 

 

St Martin's on the Hill

St Martin’s has one of the most important and complete collections of Pre-Raphaelite art in any English church. Built in 1861-3 by the architect George Frederick Bodley, it has one of the three earliest schemes of decoration by the first company founded by William Morris, along with his Pre-Raphaelite friends: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Together with Bodley himself, the company decorated ceilings and walls in the church, and also provided a nearly full set of stained-glass windows, an elegant painted reredos, a decorated organ screen and a beautifully painted pulpit. The designs and work are by Morris, Philip Webb, Rossetti, Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, Stanhope, Peter Paul Marshall and the company’s principal glass painter George Campfield.[4]

It is one of the features of work by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. that their ecclesiastical art no more disguises the identities of the models for their murals, images and stained glass than do the paintings by individual members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The images of several saints and angels in the stained glass at St Martin’s are portraits of Pre-Raphaelite “stunners”: the non-PC term given by Rossetti and friends to the several tall, striking and beautiful women who posed for them and became entangled in their lives as lovers, wives and friends. A lovely window by Morris and Burne-Jones is devoted to the ‘three Marys’ (the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany) with the images based on Georgiana Macdonald, who married Burne-Jones; Lizzie Siddall, the wife of Rossetti; and Annie Miller, one of Rossetti’s many lovers. We have, I think, no window modelled on Spartali Stillman. But one of the most intense windows, designed by Burne-Jones, daringly depicts his mistress Zambaco variously as St Dorothea, St Theophilus and an Archangel, with gorgeous flaming wings. This is certainly a connection I didn’t expect to find, mediated by the personalities and practices of the Pre-Raphaelite artists, between the London Greek community of late Victorian England and the High Church circles of then fashionable Scarborough.

 

English Heritage has not yet announced the date for unveiling the plaque in honour of Marie Spartali Stillman. But I hope that today’s London Greek community will get involved and that an image of the plaque is soon widely available. It is good to have this opportunity to recall and celebrate particularly Spartali Stillman’s work as a painter, but also the broader artistic influence of the renowned women of the Kassavetis-Spartalis-Ionidis clan. 

 

John

28 January 2023

 

[1] See the English Heritage announcement here.

 

[2] A book was produced to accompany the exhibition: Margaretta S. Frederick & Jan Marsh (ed.), Poetry in Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of Marie Spartali Stillman (Seattle: Marquand Books, 2015).

 

[3] There is an excellent overview of the milieu of 'the Three Graces' in Victoria Solomonidis-Hunter's article (in two parts) for the Friends of West Norwood Cemetery: 'Aglaia Coronio née Ionides (1834-1906)', at https://www.fownc.org/pdf/newsletter103.pdf (pp.6-8) and https://www.fownc.org/pdf/newsletter104.pdf (pp.6-8). An image gallery, giving biographical details and illustrations, of the Three Graces and their work is available here (thanks to Victoria for sharing this link with me). 

 

[4] The Friends of St Martin’s have produced a good website and several guides and booklets exploring different aspects of the church and its Pre-Raphaelite heritage. 

Greek Affairs of the Heart. Travellers in Greece. An Occasional Series 4. Dilys Powell

Dilys Powell

I made a mess of getting to know Dilys Powell (1901-1995). I encountered her first through the book she published last about Greece, Villa Ariadne (1973), and then read forward in time, with An Affair of the Heart (1957). I found both of these books beguiling, but also problematical and even, in places, off-putting. Villa Ariadne was written during the Colonels’ dictatorship but doesn’t even allude to the political travails of the country. An Affair of the Heart covers Greek politics in the immediate aftermath of the Dekemvriana, the Communist uprising in Athens in December 1944, but does so from a surprisingly angular, partisan and emotional point of view. From these two books, I gained the impression of a writer who could live only in a classicist-idealist’s view of what Greece was and is.

Nevertheless, I persisted and am glad I did. Early on in my time as ambassador in Greece, I read The Traveller’s Journey is Done (published 1943, but written in 1939); more recently, I’ve tackled Remember Greece (1941). This last book has particularly caused me to rethink my views on Powell’s writing about Greece and, indeed, to re-read all of the books, taking them in the order in which she wrote them. This I strongly recommend to anyone who wants to see Greece through Powell’s eyes. It sets this, in some ways, eccentric writer about Greece in a more sympathetic perspective.

 

Humfry Payne

Dilys Powell had a rich, long-lasting and complex relationship with Greece. She encountered the country first in 1926, on honeymoon after marrying the classical archaeologist Humfry Payne (1902-1936), whom she had met at Oxford where she was reading modern languages. Payne held a studentship at Christ Church Oxford, and from April 1926 was also the assistant curator of coins at the Ashmolean Museum. After their marriage Powell worked as a journalist in London. In the summers of 1927, 1928 and 1929, Payne excavated on Crete, with a base at the Villa Ariadne, the house built at Knossos by its famous excavator Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941). Powell spent some part of those summers with him, getting to know Greece and absorbing fragments of its language and customs. In 1929, at what would now be thought an astonishingly young age, Payne was appointed as Director of the British School at Athens. Powell joined him for some part of every year of his directorship, not least at the dig for which he is most famous. From 1930 to 1933, across four summer campaigns, Payne led the British School’s excavations at the sanctuaries of Hera Akraia and Limenia at Perachora, not far from Loutraki to the north-west of the Corinth Canal. The finds were of great importance, but Payne would not live to see their full publication; he died in Athens in 1936 of septicaemia, spread from a small wound on the knee, at the age of just 34.  Powell buried him at the cemetery of Mycenae, where his body remains today.

Sanctuary of Hera, Perachora

Powell was not a classicist and had not learned modern Greek at university. But the years spent with Payne in Greece had made an irrepressible mark on her: she returned independently to the country every year from 1937 to 1939, when the first signs of war appeared in Europe. During the war, she was recruited to the Political Warfare Executive in London: part of the British Government’s propaganda effort; there her expert knowledge of Greece involved her in Greek affairs. She returned to the liberated country in 1945, and made further journeys subsequently in 1953, 1954, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1962, 1966 and 1971. She was undoubtedly well travelled in Greece and got to know much of the country well; she formed friendships with the ‘ordinary’ Greek people she met, with archaeologists of several nationalities, including Greek archaeologists, and with some of the British expat community, including the diplomatic community.

 

John Pendlebury

The books reflect the long evolution of her experiences and knowledge of Greece. The Traveller’s Journey is Done is an account of her life in Greece with Humfry Payne, centring on the time spent at the British School at Athens and at Perachora. Remember Greece was part of the war effort; it not only reflects lyrically on Powell’s knowledge of Greece, but also offers a primer of the geography of Greece and its politics since 1922, calling on Brits not to forget Greek heroism in the 1940-1 war with Italy and looking forward to the country’s liberation from Nazi Occupation. An Affair of the Heart replays some of the moments of the earlier books, but tells more specifically of Powell’s estrangement from Greece in 1945, when she revisited the country in the closing stages of the war and found it hard to deal with the sharp polarisations of political opinion in the country; she found it even harder to handle the blame that many attached to Britain’s role in the civil strife. She stayed out of Greece for the best part of the following decade, until in 1953 she was invited to join a delegation to negotiate in Athens an Anglo-Greek Cultural Convention. That visit rekindled her love affair with Greece, and she started visiting regularly again. In 1954, the Sunday Times sent her to cover the pioneering maritime archaeology being conducted offshore of Chios. In her last book, Villa Ariadne, Powell returned to what was always the core of her encounters with Greece: the world of British archaeologists. Payne had dug on Crete, at Eleftherna and Knossos, and knew Sir Arthur Evans well. Villa Ariadne is in part a biography of Evans, at home in Oxford and on Crete, in part an account of his pioneering work at Knossos. But the second major figure of the work is John Pendlebury (1904-1941), one time curator of Knossos, expert in the general archaeology of Crete, and war hero, who was executed by the Nazis during their invasion of Crete in 1941. The book tells his story in detail, but also provides a broader account of the Resistance on Crete and of Powell’s subsequent efforts to meet the key figures in the Greek Resistance.

 

Each of the four books has high value, even if for me the first two are the best. Although written in the third person with Powell appearing as ‘Elizabeth’ and her husband as ‘Payne’ – an odd attempt to achieve, perhaps, a detached narrative voice in what is a very personal memoir, The Traveller’s Journey is Done is in essence a story of two love affairs: one between Powell and Payne, and the other between Powell, Payne and Greece. Here and in Remember Greece Powell gives a compelling, often lyrical account of interwar Greece. She captures brilliantly, I think, Athens in its seasons:

 

In winter Athens withdraws into itself; wind shouts down the dark hilly streets, restaurants open doors to show bright lights, cafés are snug and full of smoke. But on summer evenings the city puts out blossoms. The men, in summers before the war, left off their black felt hats and their dark suits (made, if they were well-to-do, of English cloth); everybody wore a linen or a raw silk suit, and even the taxi-drivers fanned themselves with boaters. At midday the sunlight was white-hot; screwing up their eyes behind dark glasses, the Athenians walked on the shady side of the street. In the afternoon the place was asleep. The shops put down their shutters for three hours. The conductor snored in his bus at the terminus. The masons, the carpenters, the plasterers left their tools lest they should be summonsed for breaking the peace of the siesta. Rich and poor sprawled on their beds in darkened rooms. Even the society busybody barred her house to callers, even her servants could rest. But as the sun slanted down towards Salamis, and Hymettos turned to rose-colour, young men and girls sauntered out of their homes to take the air…[1]

 

But she is also alert to the changes that she witnessed in the capital during the interwar years:

 

Athens…has always since I have known it been a city with the air of a capital, gay, easy, prosperous-looking. But in 1926 the transformation from a nineteenth-century Balkan town to a modern European city was still in progress. Occasional horse-cabs still shambled through the streets, the horses wearing a necklace of blue beads against the evil eye, and taxis were still not a matter of course. There were few and poor buses; the centre of Athens was served, as much of it still is, by trams. The streets and pavements, except in the middle of the city, were full of pot-holes. There was no adequate water supply, and the best drinking-water was sold by the jar, brought in carts from springs outside Athens.[2]

 

She writes lyrically about life in the countryside, recognising the hardship and isolation of peasant lives and the challenge of travel in such a mountainous country. The patterns of agricultural life had not changed for centuries:

 

The life of the countryside flows on, rhythmic, measured, tranquil. In autumn and in spring the earth is sown. Already in May in the lowlands the corn is yellow, and men and women, girls and boys, reap the fields. If they have far to go from the village, they may camp out for days. In the summers when the British School was excavating the Heraeum of Perachora on the point opposite Corinth, we would sometimes hear voices at dusk murmuring in the fields behind our tents: a family from the village six miles away, tethering the mules, and lighting a fire, and settling down to sleep. The corn is threshed on the circular stone threshing-floors beside the fields; the Greeks give to these threshing-floors the name that they give also to a halo round the moon. The sheaves are strewn thickly over the floor, a pair of mules are harnessed and driven round and round it; behind them, like a surf-rider, bumps the driver, poised on his foothold. Sometimes a woman takes charge; and then, perhaps, a tiny child will be whirled round, standing between her ankles and gripping her bare legs.[3]

 

She was aware of extensive poverty and hunger in the countryside and of their impact on the lives and expectations of villagers. Outsiders, like the British School, might bring employment to such communities and, as local villagers hoped, transform their longer-term economic prospects. This certainly seemed true of the hoteliers at a popular site like Mycenae; Powell kept track of the progress of one particular family there across the decades. But even at isolated Perachora, the community was able to build a small museum (hoping that the Heraion finds would be repatriated from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens) and roads were eventually built, to bring tourists and scholars to the site (I myself revisited the site a couple of weeks ago - see my photo above). 

 

Powell’s eye and sympathies have a wide angle to them. At the same time, she learnt about Greece and Greeks from the very particular and specialised milieu of classical archaeology. This was a milieu focused on pre-Christian antiquity. She learnt and absorbed a lot: stratigraphy, pots, tools, votive offerings, the lay-out of ancient shrines, the settlements around them, and so on. She was, however, more aware than her husband appears to have been that this was a narrow world, and not the world in which contemporary Greeks actually lived. She knew that contemporary classicists could be condescending about the Christian, Byzantine centuries and their impact on mores, values, beliefs; the shape and architecture of settlements and of lives. But despite this, she never really learned very much about Byzantium or had much interest in it (she acknowledges this as a failing in An Affair of the Heart), and seems to have understood little or nothing about Orthodoxy (though she does cover the basic rhythms of a Greek Easter in Remember Greece, p.114f.); she appears to have had no religion of her own. 

 

She did, however, learn something of the febrile vibrancy of Greek politics. Her first visit to Greece took place under the Pangalos dictatorship: she noted with some irony the excellent road he had built from Athens to Eleusis, where he ‘had a villa’, and described the absurdity of the dictatorship as far from ‘reassuring’:

 

Next the Dictator busied himself with public morality. It was the time of short skirts. In Greece at least, he declared, no woman should walk about with a skirt more than a regulation number of inches above the ground. The police were instructed to measure any doubtful legs; one day, unfortunately, they investigated the skirts of a young lady of good family, and amid the uproar the decree was noiselessly withdrawn.[4]

 

She was present for the failed Plastiras coup of 1933 and the failed Venizelos coup of 1935. In Remember Greece, she sets out a brief summary of political events from 1922 until the outbreak of the Greco-Italian War in 1940. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she had an ambivalent view of Metaxas, whom, on the positive side, she saw as responsible for the rearmament programme that enabled the Greeks to resist Mussolini. Remember Greece closes with a chapter summarising how Greeks regained their freedom from Ottoman hands and went on to create a modern state.  About 1940, she has this to say:

 

The national identity which had been preserved through centuries with so much tribulation was threatened again, the liberty which had been won was again in danger. For the Greeks this was indeed ‘total’ war: the total war of the free people of mountain and sea, the shepherds and fishermen, the men who work in fields and vineyards and olive-groves, against the men of steel and fire: the creators against the destroyers; life against death. They chose life. We need not fear, any more than they feared, the extinction of the vital spirit. Their country will live again, and they with it. In the words of Pericles: ‘Thus choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face to face, and after one brief moment, while at the summit of their fortune, escaped not from their fear, but from their glory.’[5]

 

Heady words, written when Powell was working in London for the Political Warfare Executive (the first part of the quotation reminds me vaguely of Ritsos’s The Lady of the Vineyard). And yet, war and the heroism it brought forth was an evidently unwelcome intrusion of the political into Powell’s world. She generally avoided politics and wanted to play no part in them. After the war, she hoped to escape from political issues. This is very clear from the book she published in 1957, An Affair of the Heart. Her visit to Athens and Thessaloniki in 1945 was, for her, a disaster: an ‘estrangement’; she found herself ‘quite unprepared’ for the mood of the country: ‘a country full of rage’.[6] She found herself arguing vehemently – in the cities and in the villages – with liberals, conservatives and communists alike about responsibility for the civil war, and was clearly shocked that all sides tended to blame the British (though for different reasons). Perhaps this reaction of hers was inevitable. She had spent the wartime years writing propaganda for the wartime effort; the country she loved had been liberated and, as she saw it, properly kept out of communist hands. She was not in the least prepared for the reality of civil discord and the strong and hostile emotions aroused on all sides. She decided that it was ‘time for me to get Greece out of my blood’.[7] 

 

But, as already mentioned, she was called back to Greece eight years later and, the civil war decisively won, restarted her ‘affair of the heart’. From this point on, her relationship with Greece became a non-political affair: the final two parts of An Affair of the Heart and the whole of Villa Ariadne are, in effect, exercises of nostalgia, tempered and disciplined by Powell’s continuing contacts with the country and its people. During the mid-1950s, she re-established contacts with her friends in Perachora; from 1958 onwards, she returned to Crete and renewed her connexions with the British School at Knossos. On Crete, she became increasingly keen to tell the story of the Fall of Crete in 1941 and the subsequent Resistance in the mountains, led by the Greeks themselves and the British Special Operations Executive. In both cases, Powell’s efforts to re-engage with Greece took the form, not just of enquiry and research, but also of empathetic association through hard physical effort. Inspired by the walks that she and Payne had made in the 1920s and 1930s, Powell took to her feet, becoming one of England’s legendary Greek mountain-walkers.

 

In September 1953, she walked a third of the way from Lidoriki in Phokis to Nafpaktos on the Gulf of Corinth; and the following month, she walked much of the way – often in the rain – from Ioannina to Metsovo across the Pindus.[8] In 1959 on Crete, she decided to walk over Mt Ida (‘Psiloreitis’) from Nithavris to Anoyeia, in loose emulation of the route taken by the British kidnappers of General Kreipe, the Nazi commander of Crete:

 

One wants, of course, to find out for oneself. One is curious to know what the terrain is really like – how desperate the distances, how steep the ascents and descents. Imagination alone can never conjure up the sensation of the mountains; you need the aching thighs, the thinning air, the stones under your feet.[9]

 

For me this intrepid mountain-hiking is one of the reasons to love Dilys Powell and to give her, as I did in a talk to the Benaki Museum in 2016, her due place in the pantheon of true British travellers in Greece.[10] She was gutsy and unyielding (she was 57 when she tackled Mt Ida), and she responded with raw honesty and deeply lyrical sensibility to the harshness and beauty of the Greek landscape:

 

I staggered on, zigzagging upwards, gasping for breath. When I was allowed a rest I dropped to the ground without the energy to take off my knapsack. No water, no springs anywhere, only ridge upon ridge. The cliff was behind us now, but in front I saw only the surge of the mountains, like a sea of petrified waves. Yet, in this wilderness, arid, trackless – without a guide one would be irretrievably lost – there were obstinate blossoms: pale dwarf tulips flushed with pink, their petals curling open to show a golden heart; and, its greenish-white trumpet crumpling round the yellow pistil, the tiny arum which grows on Mount Ida.[11]

 

Powell’s love affair with Greece was a long affair, which had tempestuous moments and moments of unhappiness, doubt and despair. But it was undoubtedly an affair of the heart, an affair of total surrender. For all their unevenness these four books count; they should be read and re-read, not just for what they tell us about philhellenic sentiments of the past but also for their inspiration to pick up the rucksack, to tie up the bootlaces and to walk today in Greece.

 

John

10 July 2022

 

[1] The Traveller’s Journey is Done (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1943), p.38. 

[2] Remember Greece (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1941), p.66

[3] op.cit., 111.

[4] Traveller’s Journey, p.23f.

[5] Remember Greece, p.181f.

[6] An Affair of the Heart (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1957), p.28f.

[7] op.cit., 55.

[8] op.cit., p.79-84; p.110-120.

[9] Villa Ariadne (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), p.181.

[10] J. Kittmer, ‘Περπατώντας στην Ελλάδα: Τοπία / Αφηγήματα’, in M. Diamanti (ed.), Πάτρικ Λη Φέρμορ: Και το ταξίδι συνεχίζεται (Athens: Μουσείο Μπενάκη, 2017): p.71

[11] Villa Ariadne, p.193f.