The Poetics of Manhood

Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village

Michael Herzfeld

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691102443, 9780691094106
• eBook ISBN: 9780691216386
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The description for this book, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village, will be forthcoming.

CHAPTER ONE

THE POETICS OF MANHOOD

Obscurity and Pride

In 1671, just a few years after the Turkish invasion of Crete, Ottoman documents made the first mention of the hamlet of Glendi.¹ The small village, then the home of some 230 people, lay half-hidden in a rocky valley that broke the treeline of the Mount Ida foothills at about six hundred meters above sea level. Of whatever families may have resided here during the preceding Byzantine and Venetian periods, all that remains is a single questionably Byzantine family name and a ruined Veneto-Byzantine chapel well outside the presently inhabited zone—a sharp contrast indeed to the rich testimonies of these and still older periods in nearby communities. In Glendi itself, the oldest building in the presently inhabited area dates from the late nineteenth century, when the end of Turkish rule was already in sight.

Glendi’s foundation legend, moreover, offers no clue to chronology. In part, its timeless quality springs from its celebration of something that the Glendiots of today still applaud in word and deed: the serendipitous response to hardship and poverty, the ability to turn the meager gifts of chance to advantage. When an errant goat chanced upon a rare water hole, its owner decided to settle on the spot. Later settlers consisted of men who had fled from their home villages further west to escape certain vengeance for deaths committed by their own hands. Again, the few oral records of these individuals are stereotypically uninformative.

Such obscurity seems thoroughly in character. Exposed by its sparse vegetation to the burning sun and gritty Saharan winds of summer, and chilled in midwinter by a dreary alternation of snow and drizzling rain, Glendi hides behind a reputation as opaque and uncertain as the katsifara—the cloud cover that often drifts through the village during the winter months and brings both risk and concealment to those who have furtive business in the surrounding foothills. Despite the frequent rain and fog, and the chill winter snows that occasionally render the local roads impassable, there are few safe natural sources of drinking water. A dried-up river bed, bisecting the village’s main road at its lowest point, exposes some of the houses built alongside it to the risk of flooding after a heavy rain, but offers no reliable source of water. Concentric curls of terracing fade into the winter mist or summer haze above the village, attesting to a meager agricultural activity now abandoned for two decades. Rock and scrub cover almost the entire landscape beyond the village, except where a few fields—each divided into small shares and often an equal number of different kinds of crops—bear witness to a system of equal partible inheritance that discourages large holdings. Not a place, one would think, to encourage new settlers, except perhaps those who might prefer that their whereabouts remain unknown. Today, the creation of a gleaming new silo, a sports ground, and winter animal shelters in and around the village suggests an accelerated level of activity. But the overall impression, reinforced by the villagers’ deprecating commentary, remains one of adaptation to harsh circumstances, rather than of an enthusiastically chosen location. People have rarely been expected to take up residence here voluntarily; the tradition of a refuge from authority and revenge is still an active focus of the villagers’ collective self-image.

Whatever that self-image may be—and it is the purpose of this book to explore and define it—the obscurity of the village’s situation has certainly played a major part in forming it. This obscurity protected the Glendiots from the more onerous attentions of the Turkish administration, and apparently gave them a sound refuge in which to live according to their own ideals and values. Even this freedom was ambiguous, since the local aghas (Turkish administrator) allegedly forced the local Christian maidens to dance barefoot on dried peas for his pleasure. However incomplete it may actually have been, the Glendiots’ concealment became an important aspect of their collective self-view in its own right; it expressed both their isolation from, and their contempt for, the world of farmers, merchants, and bureaucrats.

Glendi’s relationship to the rest of Crete resembles that of the island as a whole to the Greek nation-state. Glendiots regard their wealthier fellow-Cretans with marked disfavor, resenting their access to the generously watered lowland vineyards and olive groves and to the comforts of urban life in the major coastal towns (see map, fig. 1). The group of villages to which Glendi belongs, and through which it is enmeshed in a nexus of reciprocal animal raiding, is starkly marked off from the richer lowland zone by a series of severely depopulated and crumbling hamlets along the Rethimno road, while the Iraklio road is straddled by a large village whose two sections, upper and lower, seem to mark the end of the wild zone and the beginning of domesticity, respectively. Few trees grow in the upper reaches of this wilder area, although Glendi’s location in a relatively sheltered valley has permitted the planting of a few stunted olive and fruit trees, as well, it is said, as the development of a relatively mild-tempered personality type that allegedly contrasts strongly with the comparatively uncontrolled, violent tempers of the inhabitants of more exposed communities. Natural differences define cultural ones; and the social ideology of the Glendiots—the central topic of this book—is “naturally” defined by the circumstances of physical isolation and a hard life.

Fig. 1. Sketch-map of Crete showing approximate location of Glendi.

By standing at the top of the road that sweeps down into Glendi after tracing a circuitous and laborious route uphill from Rethimno, the regional capital on the coast, the visitor can get a good sense of the village’s sheltered yet isolated character. Above the road, distant yet looming, rears the snowcapped peak of Mount Ida. Closer to hand come the vast areas of scrub, rock, and deserted terracing. Only in the inhabited valley itself are there many signs of cultivation—mostly small vegetable gardens, and an occasional fig tree. When tracing this road through the long, outstretched satellite cluster down to the dry river bed and on through the main village area, then gently uphill again at right angles out to a modern church on a small promontory, the visitor then encounters a different picture. Straight ahead, a road leads down to some well-watered villages known for their extensive orange groves. Slightly to the right, another valley boasts olive trees and some straggling vines. And at right angles to the first road, a longer, straighter one leads gently upwards, away from cultivation and back up to the bare rocks on which Psila, the highest village, perches out of sight. A few smaller hamlets can be discerned in the middle distance. Suffused with bluish and violet tints, a circle of misty crags defines the horizon, and hides the sea that both protected and exposed Crete over the many centuries of a long recorded history.

Crete, by far the largest island at the outer, southern edge of the national territory of present-day Greece, regards itself as an idiosyncratic and proudly independent part of the national entity, distinct from it, physically separated from it, but yet endowed with qualities that have made Crete the birthplace of many national leaders in politics, war, and the arts. Glendiots see their village as a microcosm of what the island should have been—as, in short, one of the few communities that rebuffed any truck with foreign invaders and that preserved the moral and social values that modernity has since corrupted in the plains. While the coastal towns were open to all manner of foreign influences in dress, language, manners, and ideas, the highlanders fiercely preserved their sense of separate identity. As Greece was ideologically represented as the victim of Great Power duplicity, and Crete the victim of Greek political machinations,² so Glendiots saw their own lot as determined by unscrupulous local operators who had no concern for the Glendiots’ condition except insofar as it could be exploited for their own political ends. At the same time, as Greece claimed to have “given the light to Europe,” and Crete set an example of heroism to the rest of Greece through the islanders’ incessant resistance to the Turks, so the Glendiots and their immediate neighbors could claim to have preserved the essence of Cretan identity in their inaccessible mountain fastnesses. For example, in 1866, when Cretan monks and civilians were trapped by the Turks in the monastery of Arkadi during one of the island’s periodic insurrections, the Greek defenders preferred to blow themselves up rather than surrender. The Greek and foreign press upheld this as a true instance of Greek heroism; island historians still recall it as a mark of the isolated heroism of a Crete battling the Turks long after the beginnings of continental Greek independence in 1821; and the villagers of Glendi, while proud of both these levels of achievement, find special meaning in the fact that several Glendiots perished in the flames. Political repression and isolation are thus combined with moral purity at all three levels of a hierarchy in which Glendi stands to Crete as Crete stands to Greece.

In 1898, when Crete became an autonomous state under Greek supervision, little of this changed. Independence was short-lived, but even the incorporation of Crete into the Greek State in 1913 made little difference to the local sense of isolation. To this day there are Glendiots who remember the single village grocer laboriously driving his donkey, laden with sacks of produce that the poor soil of Glendi could not sustain, returning along barely visible tracks from the nearest market town a full day’s trek away. Even by the time the Germans invaded Crete in 1941, conditions had not changed appreciably, and indeed the continued isolation of the highland villages sustained the underground resistance during the four harsh years, full of vicious reprisals and forced labor, of German control. Glendiots played an active role in the resistance movement, and profited from the Allies’ gratitude at the end of the war. Then, and only then, did the economic and political isolation of the village begin slowly to dissipate.

Only in 1956, however, did a highland road network finally start to draw Glendi into the economic and administrative nexus of the state to any radical degree. Today, Glendiots ride down frequently to the towns by bus or private car—to arrange bank loans, buy consumer goods not brought to the village by the constant flow of vending trunks, or deal with bureaucrats and lawyers. Glendi is a mere ninety-minute bus ride away from the busy tourist center at Iraklio (a port town and point of departure for the great archaeological sites at Knossos and Phaestos), and an only slightly longer one from the regional capital of Rethimno. Even so, however, the relics of isolation are hard to overcome. Mention of the village still elicits a curious blend of indifference and alarm from urban Cretans. Irakliots wonder openly, if perhaps hyperbolically, how one can live there without getting killed or wounded; one man even expressed amazement that the Glendiots really did have municipal elections just like everyone else. In the village, new buildings, made for the most part of large cement blocks and decorated with wrought-iron railings and modern electrical fittings, are springing up everywhere, in contrast to the desolate stone ruins one encounters in so many of the lower-lying communities; but this, too, is an almost invisible development from the perspective of the urban centers. To the townsfolk, the Glendiots and their immediate neighbors are still fearsome mountain people, admired for their preservation of idealized ancient virtues as much as they are despised and feared for their supposed violence and lawlessness.

A Poetics of the Self

This study may seem to exemplify the obsession with remote and atypical communities that some have attributed to ethnographic research. Anthropologists, however, do not characteristically insist that the communities they study necessarily exemplify national or other encompassing entities (see the discussion in Dimen and Friedl 1976:286). On the other hand, scholarly nationalists of the country itself often take such apparently marginal communities as typical in an extreme sense: often, their location at the territorial edges of the country is sufficient reason to insist on their typicality in defiance of counterclaims from across the border. In the case of Greece, which is far from unique in this respect, the problem is nicely illustrated by Campbell’s (1964) study of the Epirot Sarakatsani, a transhumant pastoral community. On the one hand, the social marginality of the Sarakatsani is amply illustrated by vignettes in which they are humiliated and mocked by farmers, lawyers, and officials; on the other hand, as Campbell’s opening pages (pp. 1-6) make clear, the question of their Greekness was (and is) a burning issue, since it forms the crux of territorial disagreements with Greece’s neighbors. Much the same can be said of all the akritikes periokhes (border areas), whose very name conjures up the ambiguous status of the Byzantine heroes known as akrites—men who defended the outer reaches of Greek culture, yet represented in their own persons its adulteration by foreign influences. In the border areas, national identity confronts regional difference. The prevalence of animal theft in many such societies throughout southern Europe (see Di Bella 1983) suggests, moreover, that from a comparative perspective the choice of a community in which it is prevalent may lead us right to the heart of the paradox.

Crete certainly occupies a position at once eccentric within the wider framework of Greek society, yet one that is also central to its self-image. Its people are often despised and feared outside the island, yet its role in the development and defense of the modern Greek nation-state is widely acknowledged. Within Crete, highland villages such as Glendi have long elevated this paradoxical status to a further extreme. Even under Turkish rule (1645-1898), Glendiots were directly involved in the major events of island (and therefore also national) history, despite their physical isolation and the deep cultural and social contrasts that made them so much an object of fear and contempt to the lowlanders and townsfolk. This isolation was clearly sufficient to permit the persistence of what, by present-day Greek standards, seems a highly idiosyncratic way of life. On the other hand, it did not prevent the villagers from participating in some of the most significant events in recent national history, in ways where their fierce opposition to authority gave them a distinct advantage. In the Greek War of Independence, which began in 1821, a band of Glendiots was led by the descendant of one of the early fugitives from another village’s revenge. Their patrigroup, though depleted in numbers, is still in existence, and the fighter’s name survives as the collective designation of a sub-patrigroup consisting of his own descendants.

In 1866, again, seventeen Glendiots perished in the burning of the Arkadi Monastery at the end of a fierce but unsuccessful revolt against Turkish rule. This event so dramatized the Cretans’ plight in the context of both Greek and international politics that it hastened the emancipation of the island from Turkish rule. Their involvement cost the Glendiots dearly: the Turks, in retaliation, burned the village to the ground. The visceral meaning of this event was demonstrated to me over a century later by an octogenarian Glendiot, self-consciously dressed for the occasion in the white boots and formal waistcoat of the older local costume, who declaimed his own verses about the heroism and tragedy of his ancestors’ role in the defense of Arkadi. His usually robust voice cracked and faltered, and tears streamed down his cheeks, as he reached the point where his own relationship to the main protagonist—his grandfather—became explicit. This was not a response that could be explained away by reference to the intrusion of nationalistic rhetoric in village life; indeed, such an explanation could only succeed in sounding hollow and cheap.

Instead, what we see here is a complete identification. The narrator, imbued with a notion of selfhood that defines identity in terms ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Notes on Transliteration and Kinship Abbreviations
• Chapter One: The Poetics of Manhood
• Chapter Two: Lines of Contest
• Chapter Three: The Uses of Ideology
• Chapter Four: Idioms of Contest
• Chapter Five: Stealing to Befriend
• Chapter Six: eciprocity and Closure
• Chapter Seven: Sin and the Self
• Chapter Eight: Transformations
• Appendix Specimen Greek Texts
• Notes
• References
• Index