Anglo-Hellenism in religious form: Anglicans and the Orthodox Part IIa. Diplomacy, commerce and scholarship after the Reformation

Before the creation of the Greek state in 1830, there were two periods, separated by a thousand years, when Greek and English interests in Christianity overlapped. In the seventh century, Theodore of Tarsus was appointed and consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Vitalian, arriving in England to take possession of his diocese in 669AD. Part IIb of this blog takes a brief look at his career and his importance to the English church. In this piece I consider the contacts that arose in the immediate aftermath of the English Reformation and the particular forms that they took in the seventeenth century, a period of active, mutual interest between the Anglican and Orthodox churches. 

It is diplomacy that gives us the first window into English perceptions of Orthodoxy and Orthodox perceptions of Anglicanism. The earliest accounts by a Greek and an Englishman of travel to each other’s lands both come from the sixteenth century. In 1545-1546, Nikandros Noukios of Corfu visited England as member of a diplomatic mission from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to the English king, Henry VIII; in 1599, the organ-maker Thomas Dallam made a long trip to Constantinople, with the diplomatic objective of bestowing a magnificent and costly gift from Queen Elizabeth I and the City of London on Sultan Mehmed III. Both men wrote about their diplomatic missions, and their wonderful accounts still survive. 

Nothing is known about Nikandros Noukios beyond what he tells us in the three books of his Travels / Ἀποδημίες. He was a Corfiot, living under Venetian rule. At Venice, sometime around 1545, he met Gerardus Veltuyckus, rector at Louvain University, who was heading towards Constantinople as ambassador of Charles V. Noukios managed to get himself attached to the mission, accompanying Gerardus to the Sublime Porte and returning with him across Europe to debrief Charles at his court in Brussels. Gerardus was then sent on diplomatic business to Henry VIII in London and Noukios once more managed to attach himself to the mission. 

 

The 1540s were a period of religious ferment across Europe and, as an Orthodox Greek with no personal investment in the turmoil, he took a keen interest in religious developments. In book 1 he writes - in a crabbed form of classical Greek - about the reforms of the Lutherans: their abolition of monasticism, liturgical simplification, abolition of holy days and so on. He also reports on the activities in Munster of the Anabaptists: the radical protestants who held all property in common. 

 

Book 2 of his travels deals primarily with England, but he also went to Scotland, in the company of Greek mercenaries from Argos, and had time to absorb the prejudices of Englishmen about Ireland. His account of religious developments in England isn’t always accurate and is told entirely from the perspective of the reform party in Henry’s court, but it throws light on how the English reformers presented and explained their actions to foreigners. It’s a very different account from Noukios’ report of the Reformation in German lands. The political opposition of the Papacy to Henry’s annulment; the alleged abuses and profanities of the English and Irish monasteries; the purportedly deceitful and corrupt religious cults and ‘superstitions’: all these targets of the king’s commissioners - whether or not overblown and self-serving - are recounted by Noukios in surprisingly neutral terms: surprising in that Noukios rarely even hints at the particular perspective an Orthodox outsider might be imagined to have on the events described. One could be a little unkind and say it’s all rather gossipy and short of breath. 

 

Perhaps only in the account of the dissolution of the cult of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury, which had happened ten years earlier, does Noukios allow a small note of censure to appear. He also relates a detail, which may or may not be true, about the dispersal of the saint’s remains that is not reported elsewhere. Given the laudable Becket exhibition currently being mounted at the British Museum, I quote this passage in full:

 

'Henry, as being successor to the kings of former ages, condemned Thomas as a rebel and a pest of his country, and gave orders to commit to the fire the coffin which contained his remains. Whence those appointed to this quickly fulfilled the order they had received. Wherefore one might see the remains, formerly honoured as those of a saint, and consecrated, both dragged along the public road and exposed to the gaze of the populace; and treated with every indignity, one might say, and committed to the fire in the middle of the city, and reduced to ashes; and, having put the ashes into a cannon, they discharged them into the air. And a decree was promulgated throughout England that no one should dare, as heretofore, to speak of him as a saint, but as Thomas the rebel, and one who had been disloyal and disobedient to the kings of England.’[1]

Noukios was, as we can see above, immersed in the Zeitgeist of English reform and he absorbed a lot of Henrician propaganda: nowhere is he more credulous than in relating what he heard from the court about where the wealth expropriated from the monasteries was going. But the whole account, however naïve and unquestioning it appears, is fascinating (copies can be found in second-hand bookshops). The manuscript in which it was written was unearthed by 1841 and had been owned by Archbishop Laud, whose interest in Greeks will concern us shortly. 

 

Five decades after Noukios’ trip to Britain, Thomas Dallam, an organ-builder, found himself heading to Constantinople on an unusual mission. In 1598, wishing to obtain trading concessions in the Ottoman Empire, merchants in the City put up funds to pay for a costly present, in the form of a pipe-organ that could be played both manually and, through a clock mechanism, automatically. The present was offered as a personal gift from Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmed; it was dismantled and stowed on board the merchant ship Hector. The ship left Gravesend in February 1599 and arrived in Constantinople six months later, in August. Dallam was accompanied by the organ’s engineer, painter and carpenter, but it is his diary that has immortalised the journey and the successful presentation of the gift. 

 

Zakynthos Town

In April, the ship and its crew reached the Ionian Islands. On 20 April, the ship anchored off Zante (Zakynthos), which was then ruled by the Venetians, and the crew and passengers went ashore. It was Orthodox Easter. Dallam’s diary is the first account we have by an Englishman on Greek soil and it gives us the first report in English of Easter as celebrated in Greece. Dallam and his friends headed inland where they encountered Greeks commemorating the Resurrection and were made welcome, despite their lack of familiarity as protestants with the Orthodox liturgy - and particularly with the segregation of sexes at worship:

 

‘[Our host] bowed to me and took my hand and led me around the end of the house and through a little cloister into a chapel where we found a priest saying mass and wax candles burning. He sat me down in a pew, where I watched what the people did. There were about twenty men but no women, who were in a lower chapel by themselves, but they could still hear and see what was going on. Ned Hale came in but he didn’t see me and knelt down near the women, whom he didn’t notice. But they saw him and were surprised at what he was doing. I got up from my knees to look for him and saw two women laughing at him, as well they might, for he was making a fool of himself. Neither he nor I had ever seen any part of a mass before and we were none the wiser now. The chapel was very elaborately painted and decorated in a way I had never seen before.’ [2]

 

After the liturgy ended, the men were taken into the house to have lunch: ‘good bread and excellent wine and red eggs’. As a result of their curiosity, Dallam was thus the first Englishman to witness and record for posterity the Greek custom of dyeing eggs red for Easter. I will leave it to my readers to discover what happened when the group reached Constantinople: needless to say, more surprises lay in store for them.

 

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Dallam’s diplomatic visit to Ottoman lands in 1599 owed much to the foundation seven years earlier (1592) of the Levant Company in England: this was an early attempt by English merchants to muscle in on and exploit trade opportunities in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the following century, the activities of this company caused commercial contacts between England and the Greek-speaking world to grow; the company’s charter was subsequently confirmed and renewed by King James I in 1606 and King Charles II in 1661, respectively. 

 

Levant Company Arms

Out of its own revenues the Levant Company paid the salary of the Ambassador in Constantinople (he was appointed, formally at least, on behalf of the British monarch), and established consulates in key trading posts, particularly Aleppo, Smyrna and Constantinople itself. In Venetian-held Greek territories, the company appointed consuls in Zante (Zakynthos) and Cephalonia; in Ottoman-occupied Greek lands the company’s consuls operated in the Morea and on Chios, and, at later dates, on Crete and at the Piraeus. The Levant Company also appointed chaplains: one post was based at Constantinople and would, as we shall see, play an important role in Anglican-Orthodox contacts; the other chaplaincies were at Aleppo and Smyrna. 

In the Morea the consuls were usually based in Patras, where they superintended the large and important trade in currants (the English word ‘currant’ is a corruption of ‘corinthiaka’: meaning ‘from Corinth’). But between 1638-43, the consul Sir Henry Hyde established himself at Chlemoutsi, the site of the great Frankish castle of the Villehardouins. There he is reported to have ‘lived in great state, built a small church, and a fair house with many gardens and vineyards about it’.[3] Although its whereabouts is not, I think, now known, this ‘small church’ must have been the first Anglican church established in mainland Greece. It would be fascinating to know more about this church: what form it took, what services took place there.

 

The activities of English merchants in Venetian and Ottoman lands offered employment to Greek mariners, and the Greek merchant fleet was itself active in English ports, including London. Only a few years after the building of Henry Hyde’s small church in the Morea, the Greek community established in the English capital took its first steps to build an Orthodox church there. 

 

The efforts were begun in 1674 by Daniel Voulgaris, an Orthodox priest, who petitioned the king’s privy council for permission to build a church. Permission was granted within a year but the project languished. Efforts were boosted in 1676 by the arrival in London in exile of the Archbishop of Samos, Joseph Georgirenes; he set about raising funds and securing broad support for the building. The Bishop of London, Henry Compton, also supported the Greek initiative, while the king and his brother, James Duke of York, both contributed money to it. Land was acquired in Soho, in the Anglican parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, between what are now called Greek Street and Charing Cross Road (then Hog Lane), and building work commenced in 1677. Shortly after, Archbishop Georgirenes dedicated the church to the Dormition of the Mother of God (the dedication plaque is now in the Cathedral of the Divine Wisdom in Bayswater). 

 

The 'Greek Church' at the end of the 19th century

The experiment did not last long. The church proved to be in the wrong place for the Greek community; the Bishop of London expected the Orthodox priests to conform to the rites of the Church of England; and a case of embezzlement by one of the congregation embroiled the archbishop in unsuccessful litigation, which soon acquired an unhelpful political dimension. The Greek community gave up the church in 1682. For most of the eighteenth century, the congregation worshipped at the Russian chapel, which was under the control of Greek priests. For many years, the Greek Church in Soho (the name stuck, though the congregation had long since departed) was rented by the Anglican parish of St Anne to the French Huguenot community, then to Calvinist Independents, before being finally converted for Anglican usage in 1850. The building was demolished in 1935, its site now being occupied by Foyles bookshop. Its memory survives in the name of Greek Street.

 

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Commerce underpinned more systematic efforts to establish relations between the churches. The Levant Company’s chaplains in the East became a particular source of information and communication between the Anglicans and the Orthodox. In the second half of the century, two of the chaplains at Constantinople, Thomas Smith (1668-1670) and John Covel (1670-1676), were theologians and would go on to publish books that aimed to project authoritative views about the Orthodox Church. Runciman tells us that Smith’s account is ‘well-informed, frank but fairly sympathetic’; Covel’s much less so.[4] But this process of mutual enquiry, while slow to yield real fruit, had taken off in earnest in the first part of the century, when a correspondence began between George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Cyril Loukaris, the so-called ‘Calvinist’ Patriarch of Alexandria. In 1617, the archbishop invited the patriarch to send four Greeks to England to study theology at Oxford, at the expense of the Crown. The first to arrive was Metrophanes Kritopoulos, from Verroia, who studied at Balliol from about 1621 and would himself become Patriarch of Alexandria, in 1634. 

 

Such experiments continued under subsequent hierarchs. Under William Laud’s tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury, a Cretan called Nathaniel Kanopios also studied theology at Balliol, from 1637-1648. He is famous for introducing the English to coffee, which, like Oxford students ever since, he used to brew up every morning in college. Because of his closeness to Laud, the Puritans forced him to leave Oxford, but he made a success of his ecclesiastical career, becoming in the course of time Archbishop of Smyrna.

 

Gloucester Hall, Oxford

By the time that Archbishop Georgirenes was being forced to abandon his Greek Church in Soho, relations between the Orthodox and the theological authorities in Oxford had matured sufficiently to lead to an ambitious and radical proposal. Sometime around 1682, Georgirenes wrote to William Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to propose a permanent scheme for educating a dozen Greek theological students at Oxford. At that time, Gloucester Hall in Oxford was essentially defunct (penniless and student-less); its principal, Benjamin Woodroffe, therefore took up the Greek suggestion with enthusiasm and offered Gloucester’s premises for a model Greek College. The scheme was to be funded by the Levant Company and the students chosen by the patriarchs of Antioch and Constantinople in alternation. The surprisingly enlightened scheme got off the ground and the first students arrived in 1698. But it proved short-lived and foundered on problems that sound all too modern: the Levant Company disliked paying for it (of what commercial use were these graduates?) and in 1705, the Phanar refused to send any more students owing to the ‘irregular life’ that some of them were living in London. Clearly, the attractions of the capital were more compelling to some than the grind of theological study in Oxford. 

 

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These exchanges and contacts had done much to create opportunity to deepen mutual knowledge between the churches of each other’s doctrinal and ecclesiological principles. But a little knowledge, coupled with the practical failures of the church- and college-building schemes, proved to be too much. The florescence of interconfessional relations in the seventeenth century is of great historical interest but left no real ecumenical legacy. For much of the eighteenth century, contacts between the churches cooled. It took the creation of the Greek state and the ecumenism fostered by the Oxford Movement in the Church of England to reawaken mutual interests, in the nineteenth century. And the process of creating effective institutional ecumenical structures didn’t really begin until the twentieth century. In the final piece in this blog, I will take a look at the activities of a Greek hierarch whose leadership of the English church, a thousand years before Archbishop Georgirenes arrived in London, really did leave a legacy that lasted many centuries and is still felt in the Church of England today.

 

John Kittmer

Feast of the Venerable Bede

25 May 2021

 

[1] This quotation comes from the only English edition (Greek text plus English translation) of Noukios’ travelogue: J.A.Cramer (ed.), The Second Book of the Travels of Nicander Nucius of Corcyra (London: Camden Society, 1841): 74-75. 

 

[2] This quotation is taken from an accessible, modernised transcription of the diary: John Mole (ed.), The Sultan’s Organ: The Diary of Thomas Dallam, 1599 - London to Constantinople and Adventures on the Way (London: Fortune Books 2012): 24-25.

  

[3] Robert Liddell refers to this in The Morea (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958) 69. His source is an early travel-book by an English merchant: Bernard Randolph, The Present State of the Morea (London: Wm. Notts et al. 1689³). Sir Henry Hyde would later be appointed Charles II’s Ambassador in Constantinople, but at the request of the Commonwealth Government he was sent back by the Sultan to England, convicted of treason and executed in 1650.  

 

[4] The standard account on which I have largely relied is by Runciman. For this reference, see Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968): 292-293.

Anglo-Hellenism in a Religious Dimension: Anglicans and the Orthodox. Part I. The establishment of the new Greek State

The creation of the independent Greek state in 1830 brought a new reality to relationships between Britons and Greeks and opened up mutual opportunities in both countries. In the course of the revolutionary war, the bicentenary of which we are celebrating this year, Greek merchants fleeing from massacres in Chios and elsewhere had set up shop in London and in Manchester and Liverpool, the great industrial and trading cities of the north. Greek and British political and financial interests had also converged. The Greek loans raised in the City of London (1824-5), the (rejected) Act of Submission (1825), the Treaty of London (1827), the Battle of Navarino (1827), the three protocols to the Treaty (1828-30), the Treaty of Constantinople (1832): all this intertwined the interests of Greece and Britain to a degree unimaginable at the start of the war. With the arrival of Otto in Greece as king in 1833, Britons and Greeks turned their energies to new diplomatic and trading possibilities; meanwhile, the establishment of an English party in Athens, under Mavrocordatos’ leadership, consolidated a certain political influence of England over Greek affairs, which would last, in one form or another, for over a hundred years.

St Paul's Athens

The ground was ready not only for growth in commercial and political relations, but also for religious exchange and spiritual developments. In the new Greek state and in the English cities of the new Greek diaspora, an impetus to build religious institutions emerged. 

On the Ionian Islands, which had been a protectorate of Great Britain since 1815, the English community had already established make-shift Anglican churches, sometimes taken over from earlier Catholic usage.[1] Cemeteries too had been established for protestant burials. In 1833, Athens had no such infrastructure. Until Otto decided to make it his new capital, Athens was little more than a small, decaying town, huddled around its sacred rock and much battered by the war. The arrival in Athens of the new Greek Crown and its government not only attracted Greeks in large numbers; it also brought diplomatic legations; commercial consuls, agents and traders; ever greater volumes of foreign travellers (embarked on the Grand Tour); and all the appurtenances of cosmopolitan life. The establishment of a secure, permanent English community, with the British diplomatic mission at its heart, made it inevitable that the Anglicans would want to build a church there for their corporate worship. 

 

The English community in Athens, supported by missions of the Episcopalian Church and the Church of England, bought a plot of land for their church in 1836; a separate plot of land closer to the Ilissos river was also purchased for a cemetery. The foundation stone of the church was laid by Sir Edmund Lyons, the British Legate (equivalent of the modern Ambassador), and John Green, the British Consul, in 1838. The cost of the land and building (£2800) was met partly by the English community in Athens, partly by the British Government. The church was consecrated in 1843 and dedicated to St Paul. The chaplaincy became part of the Church of England’s Diocese of Gibraltar in Europe, which had been established the previous year. St Paul’s remains on its site today, as the heart of the Anglican chaplaincies of Greece. For many decades now, the senior chaplain has also been the Archbishop of Canterbury’s representative (‘apocrisiarius’) to the Orthodox Archbishop of Athens and All Greece. Through thick and thin, the congregation has flourished for nearly 180 years of corporate religious life.

Cathedral of the Divine Wisdom, London

The opportunity taken by the Anglican community in Athens was no different from that which presented itself to the Orthodox in London, and in the other great British cities where Greek refugees had settled. The now established merchants and their families, and the continuous flows of transient merchant marines, all needed places for worship and the celebration of their corporate religious lives. In London the Greek merchants first established a small chapel, in 1837, at the heart of their commercial ventures, which were then concentrated on Finsbury Square. A few years later, in 1850, a church, also dedicated to Our Saviour, was built in Byzantine style at 82 London Wall. In 1842, an Orthodox cemetery was established at West Norwood - just down the road from where I now live. As the Greek community prospered, it moved west out of the City to more fashionable Bayswater. There the community built a larger neo-Byzantine church, dedicated to the Divine Wisdom, between 1877 and 1882. Greek communities in Manchester, Liverpool and Cardiff followed suit, building and consecrating their own Orthodox churches in 1861, 1870 and 1873 respectively. All four of these buildings still stand today, serving their Orthodox communities.  

The establishment of these places of worship testified to the stability of the new Greek state and the confidence of its diaspora; it testified also to a new spirit of religious tolerance in both Britain and Greece. But the presence in each other’s lands of Anglican and Orthodox congregations and their clergy inevitably posed a bigger question about the relationship and intercommunion (or lack of it) between the Orthodox and the Anglican churches. The Anglicans, moreover, had to negotiate with particular care the sensitivities of the Orthodox hierarchy about proselytization. (Aggressive evangelical protestant missions in the ancient patriarchates of the Middle East were much resented and caused general friction in relations.)

 

A dialogue began, prompted particularly by the Anglicans in the USA (the Episcopalian Church) and in England. In 1906, the Anglican & Eastern Churches Association, of which I am a member, was founded through a merger of two earlier organisations; in 1928, the Fellowship of St Alban & St Sergius came into being. Both organisations are ecumenical points of contact and association between the churches. The Great War, which placed Great Britain in effective control of the Holy Land and, briefly, Constantinople, was a particular spur to dialogue. Several conferences between the Orthodox and the Anglicans were held in New York and London in 1916 and 1918. In 1920, the Ecumenical Patriarch sent representatives to the Lambeth Conference of Anglican prelates - the first time that this had happened. With Anglican support, the Ecumenical Patriarch established the Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain in 1922 as an exarchate of the Patriarchate, with the Church of the Divine Wisdom as the cathedral: the first such effort in Western Europe. 

 

Permanent expatriate institutions imply the need for a permanent and structured approach to συμβίωσις, living together. As such, ecumenical conversations have grown and matured. Since 1975, the two churches have run an official dialogue, now organised as The International Commission for the Anglican–Orthodox Theological Dialogue. Five ‘agreed statements’ - the most recent in 2015 (at Buffalo) and 2020 (at Canterbury) - have now been produced: surely a good sign of co-operation and convergence. 

It is right, I think, to trace these modern developments to the impetus provided by the Greek revolutionary war and the foundation of the modern Greek state. But links and mutual curiosity between the English church and the Orthodox churches of the East certainly predate the revolutionary war. In parts IIa and IIb of this blog, I take a look at some of the deeper history.

 

John

7 May 2021

 

[1] The ruins of the English church on Kythera are still visible; it was converted from Catholic to Anglican usage during the British Protectorate; see further Paul Watkins, ‘An English Church on Kythera’, Argo: A Hellenic review 11/12 (2020): 44-46. On Corfu, the English built the church of St George in the garrison in 1840; after the British ceded the Ionian Islands to Greece in 1864, the church was converted for Orthodox use and the Anglicans were ceded the old Ionian Assembly for use as a church, Holy Trinity Church. The building was bombed in WWII and the Anglican community of Corfu now occupies only a small part of the restored Assembly building.

Ο Φιλελληνισμός, χτες και σήμερα

Το μικρό καράβι, το οποίο κουβαλούσε μια ομάδα από περίπου είκοσι Βρετανούς τουρίστες και μαθητές, έγερνε μπροστά στον άνεμο μέσα στα ταραγμένα νερά. Ο Τζέραλντ, ο δάσκαλος και οδηγός μας, μάς διηγούταν ταυτόχρονα δυο ιστορίες και αυτές γίνονταν κάπου-κάπου συγκεχυμένες. Καθώς φεύγαμε από την προκυμαία της ωραίας πόλης, άρχισε η τοπογραφία να ξετυλίγεται σε όλες τις κατευθύνσεις. Πίσω από την πόλη, τοποθετημένη στην άκρη του κόλπου, διαφαινόταν πλέον κι ένα κωνικό όρος. Το νησί, προς το οποίο κατευθυνόμασταν, φαινόταν πλέον ακόμη πιο μεγάλο: με τις πλευρές του απόκρημνες και σκεπασμένες από δάσος. «Η παράδοση της Σπαρτιάτικης φρουράς που βρισκόταν στην Σφακτηρία, ήταν η πρώτη συνθηκολόγηση που έκαναν ποτέ οι Σπαρτιάτες,» δήλωσε ο Τζέραλντ, υψώνοντας τη φωνή του πάνω από τον θόρυβο της μηχανής. «Επρόκειτο για μια συναρπαστική στιγμή για τους Αθηναίους: μια στιγμή που τους έφερε σε αχαρτογράφητα νερά: νερά όπου δυστυχώς παραμόνευαν η Ύβρις και η Νέμεσις.» 

Τσιχλί-Μπαμπά

Στα νερά όπου πλέαμε κι εμείς, φαινόταν να παραμόνευε κι εμάς ένας αυξανόμενος κίνδυνος. Κατά τα φαινόμενα κατευθυνόμασταν τώρα προς την ανοιχτή θάλασσα από το νότιο στενό ανάμεσα στη Σφακτηρία και την ξηρά, και τα κύματα αυξάνονταν εντυπωσιακά. «Σε λίγο θα δούμε το μνημείο προς τιμή των Γάλλων ναυτικών που πέθαναν στο Ναυαρίνο», είπε ο Τζέραλντ, με τον αισιόδοξό του τρόπο. Το πλοίο σκαμπανέβαζε στα θυελλώδη κύματα, όσο πλησιάζαμε την σκάλα που είχε λαξευτεί στον πέτρινο γκρεμό της βραχονησίδας που ονομάζεται Τσιχλί-Μπαμπά. «Είναι πολύ επικίνδυνο να αποβιβαστούμε σήμερα - σύμφωνα με τον καπετάνιο, αλλά θα κάνουμε ένα μικρό περίπλου της νησίδας και ύστερα θα επιστρέψουμε για να βρούμε το αγγλικό μνημείο.»

Ήμασταν στα μέσα του Απρίλη του 1984. Ήμουνα δεκάξι χρονών. Επρόκειτο για την πρώτη εβδομάδα μιας εκδρομής τριών εβδομάδων στην Ελλάδα και κάναμε μια περιήγηση της Πελοποννήσου. Ήταν η ορθόδοξη Σαρακοστή και αναμενόταν να περάσουμε την Μεγάλη Εβδομάδα στην Αίγινα και την εβδομάδα του Πάσχα στη Σίφνο. Δεν είχα ξαναπάει στην Ελλάδα, αλλά εδώ και τρία χρόνια μάθαινα την αρχαία γλώσσα. Πρωί-πρωί της μέρας εκείνης, είχαμε επισκεφτεί το μυκηναϊκά απομεινάρια του Ανακτόρου του Νέστορα στο Επάνω Εγκλιανό. 

Ανάκτορο του Νέστορα

Τώρα μαθαίναμε για τα γεγονότα του Πελοποννησιακού Πολέμου το 425πΧ (την άλωση της Σφακτηρίας από τους Αθηναίους) και την Ναυμαχία του Ναυαρίνου στις 20 Οκτώβρη του 1827μΧ. Όσο μπαίναμε και πάλι στον κόλπο, μάς εξήγησε ο Τζέραλντ τη διαρρύθμιση του οθωμανικού στόλου (στην μορφή ενός πετάλου) και την τακτική και τεχνογνωσία των ναυτικών των συμμάχων, όταν ο Κόδρινγκτον, απαντώντας στην πρόκληση από τον στόλο του Ιμπραήμ-Πασά, εξαπέλυσε μια καταστρεπτική και καθοριστική αντεπίθεση. Από το αγγλικό μνημείο, στο Χελωνάκι, βλέπαμε, στο βόρειο τέλος του κόλπου, την επίπεδο λιμνοθάλασσα και το φραγκικό κάστρο του 13^ου αιώνα στο Παλιό Ναυαρίνο. 

Αγγλικό Μνημείο

Σε αυτή την μικρή γωνία της Πελοποννήσου φαινόταν ότι κάθε εποχή της ευρωπαϊκής ιστορίας είχε αφήσει το δικό της αποτύπωμα. Η ομηρική μυθολογία, η αρχαία και μεσαιωνική ιστορία, οι θρυλικές μορφές από την εποχή των ευρωπαϊκών αυτοκρατοριών και της ελληνικής επανάστασης, τα φαντάσματα και τα βήματα του παρελθόντος - όλ’ αυτά είχαν μαζευτεί σε αυτό το συμπυκνωμένο περιβάλλον, σ’ αυτό το τοπίο εκθαμβωτικής φυσικής εμορφιάς. 

Οι πρώτες εντυπώσεις είναι καθοριστικές. Οι πρώτες μου εντυπώσεις της Ελλάδας άλλαξαν την πορεία της ζωής μου. Σε αυτό δεν είμαι μοναδικός. Ερωτεύτηκε και ο Λόρδος Βύρωνας  - πράγμα κάπως πιο σημαντικό για την πορεία της ελληνικής ιστορίας! - κατά την διάρκεια της πρώτης του εκδρομής στην Ελλάδα το 1809. Πραγματικά ερωτεύτηκε πολλαπλά· ερωτεύτηκε, με τρόπο που έμεινε γνωστός παντού, την Τερέζα Μακρή, την «Κόρη των Αθηνών», αλλά ερωτεύτηκε - ακόμα πιο επίμονα - και την Ελλάδα την ίδια: τα τοπία της, το μυθικό της παρελθόν, τον λαό της και τα έθιμά του. Και προ παντός ερωτεύτηκε την ιδέα της Ελλάδας: μιας Ελλάδας της ριζοσπαστικής ελευθερίας, απελευθερωμένης από τις οθωμανικές χειροπέδες. Σαγηνεύτηκε από την Ελλάδα (παρέθεσα παρακάτω μια αγαπημένη μου στροφή από Το προσκύνημα του Τσιλντ Αρόλδου), αλλά φαίνεται ότι για ένα μεγάλο χρονικό διάστημα δεν πίστευε πως οι Έλληνες θα εξεγείρονταν πραγματικά για να απαιτήσουν την ελευθερία τους. Ήταν ο φίλος του, ο ποιητής Πέρσι Σέλλεϋ, που τον δίδαξε φιλελληνικό πολιτικό ακτιβισμό ενός πιο δυναμικού είδους. Η ριζοσπαστικότητα και ο ιδεαλισμός του Σέλλεϋ ξεσήκωσε τον Βύρωνα και τον ενέπνευσε στην τελευταία του μεγάλη πρωτοβουλία, το 1823: την περιπέτεια που κατέληξε στον θάνατο του Βύρωνα στο Μεσολόγγι στις 19 Απρίλη του 1824 και στην απελευθέρωση ενός μεγάλου κύματος φιλελληνικού συναισθήματος παντού στην Ευρώπη και στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες.

 

Ο θάνατος του Βύρωνα, Μεσολόγγι

Ο Βύρωνας ήταν φιλελεύθερος και η συνεισφορά του στον ελληνικό αγώνα βασίστηκε στα φιλελεύθερα ιδανικά. Αλλά επί της ουσίας ο Φιλελληνισμός δεν είναι μια πολιτική ιδεολογία, αν και έχει, βέβαια, μια πολιτική διάσταση. Η ιστορία των βρετανικών επαφών με την Ελλάδα αυτούς τους δυο αιώνες που πέρασαν δείχνει ότι ο κατάλογος των παθιασμένων Βρετανών Φιλελλήνων περιλαμβάνει φιλελεύθερους, συντηρητικούς, σοσιαλιστές και τους απολύτως απολιτικούς. Κι επιπλέον θα ήταν λάθος κανείς να φανταστεί ότι ο Φιλελληνισμός, αν και έχει ιστορικές συνδέσεις και βαθιές ιστορικές ρίζες, ανήκει αποκλειστικά στο παρελθόν. Πιστεύω πάντως ότι ο νεαρός Βύρωνας μάς δείχνει από τί αποτελείται ο Φιλελληνισμός. Απλώς, πρόκειται για μια ερωτική σχέση που μεταμορφώνει. Τα εκατομμύρια των συμπατριωτών μου που πηγαίνουν κάθε χρόνο στην Ελλάδα είναι εξίσου ευάλωτα στη γοητεία της Ελλάδας όσο και ο Βύρωνας το 1809. Το εάν η πρώτη αυτή σπίθα της αγάπης θα εξελιχτεί σε κάτι πιο σταθερό και σημαντικό ή όχι, εξαρτάται από πολλούς παράγοντες, συμπεριλαμβανομένης της προσωπικής επένδυσης του χρόνου, της προθυμίας να μάθει κανείς την γλώσσα, να αποκτήσει μια γνώση και ένα μερίδιο του πολιτισμού. Για όσους ερχόμαστε στην Ελλάδα και την ερωτευόμαστε πραγματικά, η ερωτική σχέση αυτή διαμορφώνει τη ζωή μας: οδηγεί το παρόν μας και επηρεάζει το μέλλον μας, και γίνεται κι γρήγορα ένα αγαπημένο, αναγκαίο μέρος του προσωπικού μας παρελθόντος. 

 

Οπότε, σήμερα, μια ημέρα που μνημονεύει την επέτειο των 200 ετών από την έναρξη του αγώνα της ελληνικής ανεξαρτησίας, σκέφτομαι όχι μόνο τους ήρωες της επανάστασης - όπως τον Μακρυγιάννη, τον Κολοκοτρώνη, τον Καραϊσκάκη, τη Μπουμπουλίνα, το Μιαούλη, το Μαυροκορδάτο, τον Καποδίστρια, το Βύρωνα, τον Άστιγκα, το Τζώρτζ - και τους «ανώνυμους» Έλληνες που πάλεψαν και επέμεναν, αλλά και τους σημερινούς Έλληνες: τους πολλούς Έλληνες φίλους και γνωστούς μου στην Ελλάδα, τους απόδημους Έλληνες που συναντάω στο Λονδίνο, τους πολύ περισσότερους Έλληνες που δεν γνώρισα ακόμη στην πατρίδα τους: στην Αθήνα, τη Θεσσαλονίκη κι αλλού. Σε όλους σας λέω το εξής: αυτή η ημέρα είναι δίκη σας ημέρα, εννοείται ότι μετά από 200 χρόνια της διατήρησης της λευτεριάς, αυτά που πέτυχαν οι πρόγονοί σας είναι δικό σας επίτευγμα. Όσο βαρύ κι αν φαίνεται να είναι το φορτίο του παρελθόντος, το αξίζετε και σας ταιριάζει. Εμείς που αγαπάμε την Ελλάδα, μοιραζόμαστε την χαρά σας και αισθανόμαστε αγαλλίαση για την ένδοξή σας ελευθερία. Σας στέλνω τα θερμότερά μου συγχαρητήρια και την αγάπη μου. Χρόνια πολλά!

 

Ζήτω η Ελλάς! Ζήτω η λευτεριά των Ελλήνων!

 

Τζων

Εορτή του Ευαγγελισμού της Θεοτόκου, 2021

 

Φραγκικό κάστρο, Παλιό Ναυαρίνο

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II.88

Where’er we tread ‘tis haunted, holy ground;

No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould,

But one vast realm of wonder spreads around,

And all the Muse’s tales seem truly old,

Till the sense aches with gazing to behold

The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon:

Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold

Defies the power which crush’d thy temples gone:

Age shakes Athena’s tower, but spares gray Marathon.

 

Προσκύνημα τοῦ Τσὶλνδ Ἁρόλδου, μέρος ΙΙ.88 

Εἰς οἱονδήποτε μέρος καὶ ἂν διευθύνωμεν τὰ βήματά μας, πατοῦμεν γῆν ἱερᾶν·

οὐδὲν μέρος τοῦ ἐδάφους σου καθιερώθη εἰς χυδαῖα μνημεῖα,

ἀλλ᾽ὅλη ἡ χώρα σου εἶναι εὐρὺ θέατρον θαυμάτων·

ὅλα τὰ πλάσματα τῆς μούσης φαίνονται ὡς τόσαι ἀλήθειαι,

οἱ δὲ ὀφθαλμοί μας ἀποκάμνουσι θαυμάζοντες 

τοὺς τόπους τούτους εἰς τοὺς ὁποίους μετεφερόμεθα τόσον συχνάκις

ὑπὸ τῶν ὀνείρων τῆς νεανικῆς ἡλικίας μας·

τὰ ὄρη καὶ αἱ κοιλάδες σου, οἱ λόφοι καὶ αἱ πεδιάδες σου, 

ἀνθίστανται εἰς τὴν καταστρεπτικὴν δύναμιν τοῦ χρόνου,

ὁ ὁποῖος κατηρείπωσε τοὺς ναούς σου.

Οἱ αἰῶνες ἐκλόνησαν τὰς μεγαλοπρεπεῖς οἰκοδομὰς τῶν Ἀθηνῶν,

ἀλλ᾽ἐσεβάσθησαν τὸ πεδίον τοῦ Μαραθῶνος.

Philhellenism, past and present

The Memorial to the English Sailors

The small boat, with its group of twenty or so British tourists and schoolkids, was leaning into the wind across choppy waters. Gerald, our teacher and guide, was telling us two stories at once and they were becoming occasionally confused. As we left the jetty of the pretty town, the geography opened up in all directions. Behind the town, itself set out on the edge of the bay, a conical mountain was rising. The island to which we were heading now seemed much larger; its sides precipitous and covered in forest. ‘The surrender of the Spartan garrison on Sphacteria was the first time that Spartans had ever capitulated,’ Gerald shouted, above the noise of the engine. ‘It was an exciting moment for the Athenians: a moment that carried them into uncharted waters - waters that were unfortunately stalked by Hubris and Nemesis…’ 

The waters through which we were being cοnveyed seemed themselves to be increasingly stalked, by danger. We were apparently now heading out into the open sea through the southern channel between Sphacteria island and the mainland, and the waves were getting bigger. ‘We will soon see the monument to the French sailors who died at Navarino,’ said Gerald, optimistically. The boat bounced on the turbulent waves, as we approached the stairs cut into the cliff of the islet of Tsichli-Baba. ‘It’s too choppy to land today - according to the captain, but we’ll sail round the islet and then return to find the English monument.’

The Battle of Navarino

It was the middle of April in 1984. I was sixteen. We were in the first week of a three-week tour of Greece and were travelling around the Peloponnese. It was Orthodox Lent and we were due to spend Holy Week on Aegina and Easter week on Sifnos. I had never been to Greece before, but had been learning the ancient language for three years. Earlier in the day, we had excitedly toured the Mycenean remains of Nestor’s Palace at Ano Engliano. Now we were learning about events in the Peloponnesian War in 425BC (the capture of Sphacteria by the Athenians) and the Battle of Navarino on 20 October 1827AD. As we re-entered the bay, Gerald told us about the disposition of the Ottoman fleet (arranged in a horseshoe) and the tactics and skill of the allied sailors, as Codrington, provoked by Ibrahim’s fleet, launched a devastating and decisive counterattack. From the English memorial on Chelonaki islet, we could see, at the northern end of the bay, the flat lands of the lagoon and the thirteenth-century Frankish castle at Old Navarino. In this small corner of Greece, every age of European history seemed to have left its mark. Homeric mythology, ancient and mediaeval history, legendary figures from the age of European empire and Greek revolution, the ghosts and footfalls of the past - all crowded into this compact environment, this landscape of astonishing natural beauty.

 

Yialova Lagoon, Navarino

First impressions matter. My first impressions of Greece changed the course of my life. I am not alone in that. Rather more importantly for the course of Greek history, Byron too fell in love on his first trip to Greece in 1809. He fell in love multiply. Famously, of course, with Teresa Makri, the ‘Maid of Athens’, but even more lastingly with Greece itself, its landscapes, its mythical past, its people and their customs - and above all, he fell in love with the idea of Greece: a Greece of radical liberty, freed from Ottoman shackles. He was entranced by Greece (I have placed below a favourite stanza from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage), but for many years, he does not seem to have thought that the Greeks would actually rise up and claim their freedom. It was his friend, the poet Percy Shelley, who taught him a more dynamic form of pro-Greek political activism. Shelley’s radicalism and idealism galvanised Byron and inspired him to his last great venture, in 1823: the adventure that ended with Byron’s death at Mesolongi on 19 April 1824 and the release of a great wave of philhellenic sentiment across Europe and the United States. 

Byron in Greece, by Vryzakis

Byron was a liberal and his contribution to the Greek struggle was motivated by liberal ideals. But at heart Philhellenism is not a political ideology, though it has a political dimension. The history of British engagement with Greece in the past two centuries shows that passionate British Philhellenes have included liberals, conservatives, socialists and the apolitical. It would also be wrong to think that Philhellenism, though it has important historical associations and deep historical roots, belongs exclusively to the past. I think that the youthful Byron shows us what Philhellenism is. It is quite simply a transformative love affair. The millions of my compatriots who go to Greece every year are as susceptible to falling in love with Greece as Byron was in 1809. Whether or not that first spark of love develops into something more lasting and significant depends on many factors, not least personal investment of time, willingness to learn the language, to acquire a knowledge of and a share in the culture. For those of us who come to Greece and truly fall in love with her, this love affair shapes our lives: it guides our present and moulds the future and soon becomes a treasured, indispensable part of our personal past. 

So on this day, which marks the 200^th anniversary of the launch of the struggle for Greek freedom, I am thinking not only of the heroes of the struggle - Makrygiannis, Kolokotronis, Karaiskakis, Bouboulina, Miaoulis, Mavrocordatos, Capodistrias, Byron, Hastings, Church - and of the ordinary Greeks who fought and endured, but also of today’s Greeks: my many Greek friends and acquaintances, the Greeks I meet in London, those greater numbers of Greeks I have yet to meet in their homeland: Athens, Thessaloniki, and elsewhere. I say to all of you: This day is your day; it goes without saying that after 200 years of sustaining liberty, what your ancestors achieved is now your achievement. However heavy the burden of the past sometimes seems to be, you are worthy of it and you carry it well. Those of us who love Greece share in your joy and rejoice in your glorious freedom. I send you my warmest congratulations and my love.

 

Long live Greece! Long live Greek freedom!

 

John

Feast of the Annunciation, 2021

 

Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II.88

Where’er we tread ‘tis haunted, holy ground;

No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould,

But one vast realm of wonder spreads around,

And all the Muse’s tales seem truly old,

Till the sense aches with gazing to behold

The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon:

Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold

Defies the power which crush’d thy temples gone:

Age shakes Athena’s tower, but spares gray Marathon.

Nestor's Palace, Summer 2016

An Anglo-Hellenic Voice from the 1930s

Although the laurels for making the English literary world aware of C.P.Cavafy go to the novelist E.M.Forster, the earliest known English poetry that responds to Cavafy’s work and suggests his influence is by William Plomer (1903-1973).[1] I had forgotten that fact, though not the name, when, in late 2019, checking over what was new and what was newly reprinted on the LGBT shelves in the Cambridge Waterstones, I discovered a finely bound selection of Plomer’s poetry. Within that new edition, brought out by Little Island Press, I found a handful of interesting poems about Greece and so bought the book.[2] As usually happens with interesting writers, one book led to another. And in the past few weeks, I’ve settled down to get to know Plomer’s life and work better.

Plomer, who was born and partly raised in colonial South Africa to English parents, is largely unknown now: in his own time, his own writing was highly esteemed, but he was also, as the reader at Jonathan Cape, the discoverer of Kilvert’s diaries and of Ian Fleming. He had a cosmopolitan outlook and was moulded by his early experiences of South Africa, England and Japan. He made only a single visit to Greece, which he describes beautifully in his autobiography - I’ve set out an extract below.[3] In 1930, accompanying the painter Anthony Butts (1900-1941), he spent some months in Athens and on Corfu, which at that time was almost entirely unvisited by tourists. During his weeks in Athens, he picked up ‘a voluminous anthology of Greek poetry’ and was captivated by the photograph of Cavafy.[4] Plomer was not only the first English poet to absorb elements of Cavafy’s work, he was also one of the first English writers to ‘rediscover’ the literary potential of Greece (Lawrence Durrell, for example, would not arrive on Corfu until 1935; Robert Liddell arrived in Athens only in 1939) and to find in Greece not so much the dead remains of classical antiquity as the vibrant possibility of contemporary erotic adventure. His experiences there would yield poems and short stories, all of which show a sharp eye for people, their customs and quirks, and for landscapes too.

 

Plomer was gay and he found working-class Greek men both to his taste and available. It wasn’t all casual and fleeting dalliance; in Athens he started what seems to have been the first serious love affair of his life with a Greek sailor called ‘Nicky’. The affair lasted some weeks but ended badly, with Nicky robbing Plomer and dumping him. But it left behind at least one ravishing poem (see below) and brought Greece firmly within the orbit of Plomer’s literary world. In those years, Plomer conducted a short correspondence with Cavafy and wrote several poems and short stories about Greece that demonstrate a knowledge of Cavafy’s poetry. Several years later, he was introduced in London by the publisher John Lehmann to the Greek poet, Dimitris Capetanakis, whose published work (in Greek and English) has recently been collated and issued in an edition by Emmanuela Kantzia.[5] Capetanakis had been swiftly accepted into the well-defined set of talented gay English writers and publishers (Forster, Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Sitwell, Ackerley, Lehmann and so on); he and Plomer became friends, until Capetanakis’ early death in 1944. Plomer recognised in Capetanakis’ English poetry the merits of ‘a real English poet’, observing that ‘the growth of his sympathy with England & the English would have borne much fruit if he had lived.’ This is a connection about which one would like to know more.

Before the new Little Island Press edition, Plomer’s own work was in danger of becoming unknown by the reading public, though it has attracted some interest in recent years among academics.[6] Everything except the new Selected Poems is out of print, but most things can be found through Abebooks and the online catalogues of second-hand bookshops. From what I have been able to locate in these months when the pandemic has closed our libraries, the body of Greek work is interesting and deserves to be considered as a whole.

 

There are five short stories about Greece, published in The Child of Queen Victoria and Other Stories: ‘Folk Tale’, ‘Nausicaa’, ‘The Crisis’, ‘The Island: An Afternoon in the Life of Costa Zappaglou’ and ‘Local Colour’. Three of these (‘Nausicaa’, ‘The Island’ and ‘Local Colour’) depict - unmistakably but with characteristic discretion - a complex homoerotic milieu.[7] They are skilful and charming. ‘Nausicaa’ depicts Corfu in an astringent, somewhat cynical manner entirely unlike that of the Durrell brothers, and is all the more interesting for that.

 

While he was on Corfu, Plomer became interested in the character of Ali Pasha. That too yielded a book: a surprisingly fine biography published in 1936.[8]

 

There are at least twenty - probably more - poems written about Greece. The largest set (‘A Sprig of Basil’) is in the collection called The Fivefold Screen. Others can be found in the new Selected Poems or in the Collected Poems.[9] The types of poem vary. Four are translations from modern Greek. ‘The Philhellene’ (1930) is one of the satirical ballads - a genre that Plomer practically invented; it describes, with mordant humour and calculated bad taste, the illusions and disillusion of a female American philhellene in Athens: ‘She had plenty of dollars, / But felt that scholars / Alone could master / Classical Greek, / The enclitic particle / Quite defeated her / And declining the article / Left her weak’. The most memorable lines are examples of English comic writing at its silliest and most playful: ‘Then one Papayannopoulos / Took her up the Acropolis / And began to monopolize / Most of her time.’

 

‘The Philhellene’ is an amusing if clever trifle. But the serious poems are a more lasting legacy. From 1930, ‘Another Country’ expresses a debt to Cavafy’s ‘The City’, while ‘Corfu’ captures wistfully the island’s melancholic aspect (‘Across the old fortezza fall / The crystal rulings of the rain’). ‘The Klepht’ is a good poem to read in this bicentenary year. ‘Archaic Apollo’ brings a modern, gay sensibility to the ancient world; in ‘The Land of Love’ that sensibility acquires a mordant tone. But the best two Greek poems, in my opinion, are ‘Three Pinks’ (1930) and ‘A Casual Encounter’ (1972). ‘Three Pinks’ describes a delicious moment in Plomer’s affair with Nicky. It is not, I think, a simple derivation of Cavafy’s work, but stands in the same relation to Cavafy as do some of Dinos Christianopoulos’ erotic poems, being both an emanation and an extension of the Cavafian style. ‘A Casual Encounter’, by contrast, is one of Plomer’s final poems, from the collection Celebrations, published a year before Plomer’s death. It is dedicated to Cavafy’s memory and is a sure sign of his abiding, life-long influence on Plomer’s work. Both can be found in the Collected Poems and in the new Selected Poems. I have set out a fragment of the later poem below and hope it draws you too into the world of William Plomer. It’s worth spending some time there.

 

John

12 March 2021  

 

‘Moderately Grand Tour’ - an excerpt from The Autobiography of William Plomer

 

Late in the afternoon, or sometimes in the morning, we went off to Glyphada or Vouliagmeni to swim and then to come out and sit in the sun and drink retsina under the pine trees. The colour and salinity of the sea, the piny fragrance of the shadows and the piny tang of the wine, the clearness of the wine and of the white-wine-coloured sea-water, the salty warmth of the skin and of the blood, the warmth of the sun and of the sand all seemed interfused, as if the elements of earth, air, fire, and water were one element, in which life was immortal. As often in those parts, a sensuous experience of a certain complexity seemed also a spiritual or at least a suprasensory experience.

 

A Casual Encounter

 

(in memory of Cavafy, 1863-1933) - an excerpt

 

They met, as most these days do,

among streets, not under leaves; at night;

by what is called chance, some think

predestined; in a capital city, latish;

instantly understanding, without words,

without furtiveness, without guilt,

each had been, without calculation, singled out.

 

Wherever it was they had met,

without introduction, before drifting this way,

beneath lamps hung high, casting

cones of radiance, hazed with pale dust,

a dry pollenous mist that made

each warm surface seem suede, the sense of touch

sang like a harp; the two were alone.

 

To be in private in public added oddness,

out of doors in a city with millions

still awake, with the heard obbligato

of traffic, that resolute drone,

islanding both, their destination

the shadow they stood in. The place

should perhaps be defined.

 

But need it? Cliff walls of warehouses;

no thoroughfare; at the end a hurrying 

river, dragonish; steel gates locked;

emptiness. Whatever they said

was said gently, was not written down,

not recorded. Neither had need 

even to know the other one’s name.

 

…

 

 

[1] I first became aware of Plomer in 2007, thanks to Prof. David Ricks's legendary module 'Cavafy: Reader and Read' in the then MA Modern Greek syllabus, sadly now discontinued (like so many British humanities courses), at King's College London. 

[2] William Plomer, Selected Poems (ed. Neilson MacKay) [Stroud, Little Island Press 2016]. There is a good review of this selection by David Collard in the TLS no.5948 (31 March 2017): https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/benign-muscular-owl-william-plomer-poetry/

[3] William Plomer, The Autobiography [London, Jonathan Cape 1975]. Chapter 26 ‘Moderately Grand Tour’ describes the trip to Italy and Greece.

[4] Details of Plomer’s life can be found in the fine and sympathetic biography: Peter F. Alexander, William Plomer: A Biography [Oxford, Oxford University Press 1989]

[5] Δημήτριος Καπετανάκης, Έργα: πρώτος τόμος - τα δημοσιευμένα 1933-1944 (επιμελ. Εμμανουέλα Κάντζια) [Αθήνα, ΕΚΕΠ & ΜΙΕΤ 2020]

[6] There are (censorious) references to Plomer’s presence in Greece in David Roessel’s admirable In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002). Specific articles looking at Plomer’s Greek work include Konstantina Georganta, ‘“And so to Athens”: William Plomer in “The Land of Love”’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010): 49–71 and Dimitris Papanikolaou, ‘Between Philhellenism and Greek Eros: Reading Christopher Isherwood’s and William Plomer’s “Greece”’, in Evangelos Konstantinou (ed.), Das Bild Griechenlands im Spiegel der Völker [Frankfurt, Peter Lang 2008]: 421-432.

[7] William Plomer, The Child of Queen Victoria and Other Stories [London, Jonathan Cape 1933]. All except ‘Folk Tale’ were reprinted several years later in William Plomer, Four Countries [London, Jonathan Cape 1949]. 

[8] William Plomer, Ali the Lion [London, Jonathan Cape 1936].

[9] William Plomer, The Fivefold Screen [London, Hogarth Press 1932]; Collected Poems [London, Jonathan Cape 1973].