Hammond was eighteen when the Second World War broke out and he spent it in the Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman. In 1946, he was demobbed and took up a place at Oxford to read history. There he became interested in Eastern Orthodoxy and decided to train for the Anglican priesthood. On graduating and before entering theological college, he won a scholarship from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki to study the Church of Greece in its northern dioceses. He studied and travelled extensively there from 1948 to 1950, and in 1951 won a prize from the University of London for a preliminary draft of the book that would finally be published in 1956.[1]
To speak of the man and his work in these terms is something of a disservice, flattening and banalizing Hammond’s raw experiences in Greece and the book that resulted from them. The fact is, when he arrived in Thessaloniki, the Civil War was still raging in the Pindus mountains and the lives of the local clergy and their parishioners were caught up in the murderous cross-fire of the national struggle between the Government and the communist forces. Like the American Kevin Andrews, who was travelling through the Peloponnese at broadly the same time, to conduct research on the castles of the Morea, Hammond appeared undaunted by the dangers and gained access to many war-torn communities, in his case with the help of the military, civilian and ecclesiastical authorities. Both The Waters of Marah and Andrews’s The Flight of Ikaros: Travels in Greece During a Civil War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959) can be profitably read together as, in some ways, parallel, contrasting attempts, by foreign writers with different ideological perspectives, to tell the story of Greece in those difficult years.
At any rate, The Waters of Marah is a unique compendium of civil-war testimony, theological reflection, ecclesiastical history, biography and personal memoir, and luminous travel-writing. But it also reflects, and reflects on, past English (and Anglican) encounters with Orthodoxy. Hammond refers to and quotes from many of his predecessors, such as John Covel and Thomas Smith - chaplains of the Levant Company, whom we have encountered in an earlier blog, in the eighteenth century; he often gently dissociates himself from their views. He clearly felt closer to the scholarship of John Mason Neale, the Cambridge Camden Society’s main expert in Orthodoxy, in the nineteenth century. Like Neale, Hammond was closely involved in the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association, whose general secretary he was from 1953 to 1955.
The Waters of Marah can be analysed in terms of chapters that deal with: church history (chapters II, III); church organisation (ch. IV); monasticism (ch. VII, VIII); the church’s social and relief programmes (ch. IX); church education and ecclesiastical training (ch. XI-XIII); church liturgy and customs (ch. VI, XV). But all of this is enlivened by Hammond’s acute awareness of the resurgence of Orthodox theology (in Paris, the USA and in Greece) and by vivid writing from his own travels, which provide an audible heartbeat to the narrative. There are, moreover, three particular chapters which offer a direct, extended testimony of life as it was being lived in the communities endangered, displaced and brutalised by the civil war: ch.V ‘A Village Festival’; ch.X ‘A Macedonian Diocese’; and ch.XIV ‘The History of a Country Parson’.
When the last of the antidoron had been distributed, Anargyri had replaced the mitre in its black box, and the Metropolitan had concluded a long conversation with the churchwardens about the best method of shoring up the roof…, we left the church and made our way to the dwelling of the parish priest where a vast table had been erected in the shade of a vine. There we feasted until it was high afternoon: the Lord Agathangelos, the president of the community, the kapetanios of the militia, the papas, the schoolmaster, Anargyri, the churchwardens, the singers and several officers from the garrison of Nevrokopi who had accompanied us to Dasoto that morning. It was not by any means my first experience of a village festival: a few months earlier I might well have been deceived into thinking that the bowls of eggs, goat’s milk cheese, olives and finely-shredded vegetables soaked in oil and lemon which appeared with the ouzo constituted the substance of the feast not a mere hors d’oeuvre. Now I knew better, and I was not surprised when the clearing of the table by the papadia [2] and her daughters after forty minutes proved to be no more than a prelude to a banquet of an altogether more serious character. [p.50]
In 1937, the parish priest died. The elders of the village debated the question of a worthy successor - and who more suitable than the carpenter, Constantinos Photis? A man universally respected among his fellows for his uprightness and integrity; who knew the intricacies of the Venetian service-books with a familiarity such as could come only from long experience. Polycarp, Metropolitan of Trikkala and Staghi, willingly acquiesced in the village’s choice of a pastor, and Constantinos Photis, the carpenter, went off one day to Trikkala (after a short stay in a nearby monastery) and returned clad in black gown and kalymmafchion [3] as ‘Papa Costas’. [p.156]
While he was also very interested in the Church’s efforts to raise the standards of theological education of its priests, Hammond was impressed and surprised by the community-based formation of many a Greek parish priest. He goes on to recount, with admirable simplicity, the fortunes of Papa Costas and his family as they deal with German and Italian brutality under the occupation, and then face further displacement at the hands of communist forces under the civil war. It is a well-told story.
The paths were ice-bound and treacherous, the snow deep in places. Spelaion came into view after half an hour, set amongst towering cliffs. A long and laborious ascent between high rocks, the Venetikos murmuring through its gorge far below, the path clinging to precipitous cliffs rising from the dwarf oaks and myrtle to lose themselves in the grey mists that swirled around their summits, brought us to a point immediately below the village. After a stiff climb through massive fortifications of uncertain date, we suddenly found ourselves looking down upon a tiny Byzantine church with twin domes, sharply outlined against the untrodden snow; a sombre red jewel laid in a setting of purest white. This proved to be the catholicon of a small monastery, dedicated to the Mother of God. [p.105.]
When they reached the monastery, they found the church intact but in disarray, while the rest of the monastery had been utterly destroyed. In accounts such as this, Hammond tells a riveting tale with skill and control. He unfolds the story of the impact of a decade of war in terms that are neither sensationalist nor mawkish, but carefully and compassionately descriptive. The quality of writing about geography, climate and people is notably high - and the reason why I have included Hammond in this series.
Hammond was very interested in the whole process of religious revival in Greek Orthodoxy since the mid-nineteenth century. He drew particularly close to those involved in the Zoë (Ζωή) Movement, which would play a much criticised role under the Colonels’ dictatorship, and it is clear that Zoe was very keen to facilitate Hammond’s access to academics (lay and clerical) and to sources of Orthodox renewal. There is, in this book, little or no attempt to consider the Civil War from a perspective other than that of a Church that felt threatened, and was threatened, by the communists after 1946, in a way that was markedly different from the more harmonious positions taken by the communist leadership and many priests in the early years of the Resistance in the mountains, after 1941. Wider matters of politics do not figure here. None of this, I think, seriously detracts from the value of the book as a very particular testimony to the times. As I mention above, there are different accounts by different travellers in this time telling the story from a different perspective.
For me at least, much of the value of The Waters of Marah lies in Hammond’s close familiarity with a church that was under pressure from civil war, but was managing to preserve so much of its ancient way of life, in communities that continued, where war allowed, to exist in conditions little changed from time immemorial:
To this day the majority of the villages of northern Greece are inaccessible to wheeled transport, at any rate during the winter months; and while the truly remarkable achievements of the last few years - the repair of the shattered railways, and the construction of roads and air-strips - have given Greece a very fair system of long-distance communications, the facilities which most bishops enjoy for travel within their own dioceses remain much as they have been since apostolic days. The metropolitan of a country diocese will think nothing of long journeys by mule or mountain pony across appallingly difficult terrain, his episcopal vestments slung from the high wooden saddle; of fording torrents swollen by the melting snows; and negotiating precipitous slopes where the path seems scarcely to afford adequate foothold for a goat - much less for an elderly ecclesiastic. It is little wonder that many mountain villages saw their father in God but seldom, even in the days before the natural hazards which confronted the traveller had been supplemented by mines and wandering bands of katsapliades, as the Communists were styled in the villages. [p.29]
The landscapes of northern Greece are the dramatic backdrop to this finely woven analysis. But it is Hammond’s admiration for the Church of Greece, its ancient way of life, and its rootedness in the lives of ordinary believers that shines out in this book. It is very much a case of travel-writing plus.
John Kittmer
30 October 2021
[1] There is an account of Hammond’s life in the obituary of him, by Esther de Waal and Keith Murray, in The Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-canon-peter-hammond-1082634.html.
[2 ] A papadia is the wife of a Greek priest, a papas.
[3] The kalymafchi is the tall, black, cylindrical hat worn by Orthodox priests.
No comments:
Post a Comment