by Robert Eisner

Mani Happy returns In the South Peloponnese

The gates of Paradise may be permanently barred against us by an angel with a fiery sword, but paradise on earth still sometimes spontaneously appears more frequently in Greece than elsewhere.

On the harborside table in front of us, in the Peloponnesian village of Gytheion, sat a lunch of fried calamari, village salad, stale bread and two bottles of good Greek beer.To one side, a dozen octopuses hung drying out of cats reach on a line strung between light posts. To the other, a few hundred feet across the water and connected by a causeway to the mainland, little Marathonisi ("Fennel Island") beckoned.

According to legend, it was on Marathonisi(anciently called Kranai) that Paris and Helen spent their first night of love. Helen's husband Menelaus had been summoned to his grandfather's funeral in Crete.Before leaving, he asked Helen to entertain the handsome Trojan prince who a few days before had fetched up on their palace doorstep at Sparta, some 30 miles inland from where we sat on the quay squeezing lemon on our lunch. She entertained him all too well. They ran away together and the result was the Trojan War.When that was won by the Greeks, Menelaus brought Helen back home and the marriage resumed -with the help of tranquilizers, according to Homer's accounting the "Odyssey".

Over on the islet, a lighthouse and a small medieval fortress crumbling peacefully amid the cypresses and Aleppo pines stood out crisp and bright in the June sunlight. Surely we should pay such a seductive place of seduction a visit.But the waiter said with a shudder that it was swarming with campers, and at night it was the local smoothing spot.

The lunchtime vision of paradise dissolved into a pile of dirty dishes and an oil-splattered tablecloth.It was time to go, but first we had to start the car, a gutless manual-choke Citroen from an Athens rental agency. I found the door lock in my pocket, stuck on the ignition key. Luckily , it slipped back into its hole in the door handle and turned at a flick. We were heading south, to the Mani - the middle of three finger-like peninsulas protruding into the sea from the bottom of the Peloponnese, itself a massive peninsula that constitutes southern Greece.

Even since reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's Mani, "I have had the Deep Mani-the southern part of the peninsula- at the top of my list of dream destinations. This is one of the most remote parts of Greece, both in its geography and its customs. Only in 1983 was the road down the west side of the peninsula and up the east completely pave. Previously, many villages were cut off every winter by the rains, and the road doesn't reach many hamlets in the hills.

The people have long prided themselves on their independence and fiercely defended their lands and rights against invaders - and against on another in blood feuds that could last for generations and take dozens of lives. Laboring night and day to build their stone towers higher and higher, amen and women fought alongside one another, and the women sang graveside dirges, some of which have passed into the popular tradition of folk poetry.

The feuds suppressed, or at least the cannons are silent, and peace long since made with the Turks who tried for centuries to control this land and with the government in Athens. The Maniotes have given up piracy, at which they excelled, and the slave trade that went with it.The soil is too poor and stony to bear more than a meager subsistence, and with the assassination rate lowered the towns have had to send their excess of sons to work in Athens and abroad. Tourism of a pleasantly mild sort has begun to bring in some revenues.

My wife Elaine and I took a figure-eight route down the peninsula, with Lola the Airedale hanging her lantern-jawed head out the back window, inhaling air fiercely scented with the thyme and oregano that furred the bleak slopes above us.

We did not stop, although we should have, at the Castle of Passava, build by the Crusaders. We hurried instead to the western coast, to Areopolis, with 900 inhabitants the chief town and entry point to the Deep Mani. We paused here to admire an enormous retired millstone that seemed to have taken one too many drinks and was leaning against a whitewashed wall until the dizziness passed. The full Biblical horror of being thrown into the sea with such a weight around one's neck struck me. In the local pharmakeion the druggist cheerily sold me more than enough Prednisone to kill myself-to replace the dog's allergy pills we ourselves had taken the night before to relieve the itch of dozens of mosquito bits per limb.

About a mile along the road south we turned off at the village of Pirgos Dirou to follow a road that would 2.5 miles down to the Bay of Diros. Here one sometimes encounters the only crush of tourists in the Mani, a transient horde bused in to see a natural wonder. For here a series of marvelous caves, exiting on the sea, were opened to the public in 1963.These caverns are said to run discontinuously under the great spine of the Taygetos massif, for 40 miles north to Sparta. Rainwater percolating through the cracked and porous limestone has formed magnificent stalactites and stalagmites.

Paying our entrance fee to a uniformed Charon, we traveled by punt across the limp clear pools of semisalt water of an underground lake, varying in depth abruptly from six to 60 feet. Plain white lights went on as we glided into the first chamber, then off and on in the next chamber. Beautiful glistening segments of the mountain's intestines were caught by the light and then plunged in darkness again, and the underwater rock formations -giant polyps, veins and odd protuberances - were almost as brilliant and arresting as those above.

After 45 minutes of touring Glyfada cave, we disembarked while still underground and walked through the second cave system Alepotrypa(Fox's Den). About halfway through, the lights went out on us -for a mere 30 seconds, but out nevertheless. Next time Elaine and I will take a flashlight.

Twenty miles south, we settled in for a couple of days at Gerolimenas(Yerolimen), a ramshackle but charming and peaceful little port with only one store but two hotels, neither in the luxury class but both perfectly clean and adequate. In one we dined off fish stew so bony I gave up on the spoon and strained the broth through my mustache . In the other we ate plain spaghetti served with a lump of tomato past on top. One does not go to the Mani for cooking.

Over breakfast one morning we watched a man with no hands pick up his morning cognac with his wrists. Many fishermen around the coastline of Greece have lost a limb or an eye to dynamite-a hasty and dangerous way to fill the hold with fish. Another man came in carrying an old shotgun with exposed hammers and beautiful Damascus barrels. He proudly displayed a dead hawk to the village policeman and his cronies. It is illegal to shoot birds of prey - as it is to dynamite fish- but in the Mani the police do not interfere with local ways unless pressed to do so.

It was pleasant to watch the wife and daughters of the proprietor sitting and talking easily with the men, not a common occurrence in rural Greece. This free and breezy behavior stems from the tradition of the women's fighting alongside the men in battle -or guaranteeing their safety on errands during quiet intervals-and from the extreme sense of honor here. No man would dream of molesting a Maniote woman. If her husband didn't kill the offender, she herself would.

Although it is the best camp for which to explore the southern Mani, there is next to nothing to do in Gerolimenas itself besides swim, read and walk among the prickly pear that grows to demonic heights in the thin soil along the shoreline. It would, however, be a fine place in which to hunker down for a while, to write the tricky ending to a long novel or digest a difficult divorce .Ends of the earth have an attractive desolation.

From Gerolimenas it is possible in a day to visit several of the dozens of marvelous little Byzantine churches of the region. Mostly abandoned, or nearly so , they appeal to those with a taste for ruined places and old graveyards as much as to those with an interest in Byzantine architecture and frescoes.Here a smattering of modern Greek, or a talent for mime, helps in hunting down the person with the key should your church of choice be locked. If it's unlocked, be prepared to find a donkey or a few goats inside. Sadly, the government is not able to protect the art from theft, and many of the desecration's in the churches are due to greed rather than iconoclasm.

Kitta,Pyrgi and Flomohori are towns to visit for their clusters of towers, memorials of a bloody past and harbingers of tourism to come,.The government has refurbished several towers in Vathia to house a restaurant and guest lodges.

South of Gerolimenas, we found Porto Kayio to be another end of the earth, with not even a hotel but instead the ubiquitous Domatia, rooms to for rent. The bay offers fine bathing, and from a cemetery on the crest of the road above the town we could have walked along a mule track an hour further sought to a little bay and the remains of the Temple of Poseidon. Sailors trying to round danger around Cape Matapan would put in here in ancient times and offer sacrifices to the god of the sea for a safe passage.

Here too the great seventh century B.C. poet Arion was deposited on shore by a friendly dolphin. Arion had been returning from a lucrative singing tour of South Italy when the sailors transporting him, suddenly turned piratical, stole his purse and forced him overboard. Arion leaped off singing, and a dolphin, perhaps attracted by the music, came to his rescue and transported him to shore. Or so the legend recorded by Herodotus would have us believe.

Nearby on beach, below a ruined church, is a small cave. This is almost certainly the famous Cave at Tainaron, one of the mythical entrances to the Underworld. Patrick Leigh Fermor had the captain of the little boat in which he was rounding the cape in the 1950's steer in circles while he jumped overboard and swam inside. But he found the back wall of the cave smooth and free of the merest crack that might lead down to Hades.

Alas, pressed for time and lacking water bottle, we did not make the trek down to the tip; but then that gives us a reason to return.

From Porto Kayio the road crosses over to the east side of the peninsula and turns back north along the loveliest stretch of coastline I ever seen. Steep, violet-clad mountains plunge directly into an azure sea for 10 miles along the scalloped coastline. At Flomahori the road heads west and back over a lush saddle of farmland across the mountains to Areopolis.

Here a traveler may momentarily be at a loss. Where to go in Greece after one has been to the Mani?We drove on to Pylos, in the southwest Peloponnese, on the breathtaking reaches of windy Navarino Bay. There is no lover spot in Greece. But then we had already been to Monembassia, in the southeast, a Byzantine town on a Gibraltar-like rock linked to the mainland by a causeway. It was there the mosquitoes had found us . Alternatively, you could return to Gytheion to catch the ferry to the little port of Kastellion in western Crete, and travel on to Khania, the White Mountains, the Gorge of SAmaria, Knossos......

In Greece there is always an elsewhere that beckons.

Drop your e-mail here webmaster@laconia.org

Send mail to webmaster@laconia.org with questions or comments about this web site.