Black Angel of Liberty

 
for Kalavryta



When people in Greece utter the name "Kalavryta", their tone of voice changes. It is a name imbued with sorrow, awe and reverence. It is a place of martyrdom in a land that has seen no shortage of martyrs.

Seemingly remote though its location may be, nestled high in the mountains of the Peloponnese above the southern shores of the Gulf of Corinth opposite Parnassos (although this eminence is hidden from Kalavryta) the village has literally risen from its ashes, along with the phoenix of memory.

Now, as in the winter of 1943, Kalavryta may be reached by a narrow, precipitous road with many hairpin bends, or by a narrow-gauge cogged railway, built by Italian engineers in 1885, with a little train that climbs like a cheerful caterpillar up the twenty-two kilometres of track from the coastal village of Diakofto. Kalavryta's more recent associations have all but overshadowed its ancient origins as the site of the city of Kinaetha, according to the chroniclers Pausanias and Polyvios a thriving centre of the hunt by 776 BC. It is for a hunt of a different kind that Kalavryta is commemorated today.

Then, in 1943, as now, the township whose name means "springs of good waters" was a centre of provincial administration, a thriving community of local government officials, teachers and priests, shepherd folk and artisans, whose proudly independent tradition brought them into direct conflict with the Nazi invaders and occupiers of their country. During the Occupation, reprisals were characteristically indiscriminate and brutal. Entire villages were massacred on the flimsiest pretext. Monasteries were torched.

Kalavryta lies on the route connecting two celebrated monasteries, Mega Spilaion (the Great Cave), founded in the natural cavern where an icon attributed to Saint Luke miraculously appeared in 362 AD, and Aghia Lavra, founded in 961 AD, which is in a very special sense the holiest of holies, being the site where the banner was raised in the name of liberty from the Ottoman Turkish occupation by Bishop Germanos of Patras, in March 1825.

From the initial call to arms farther south, in Kalamata, on March 23, the spark of rebellion, consecrated in the monastery of Aghia Lavra two days later, flared and spread into the pan-Hellenic struggle for liberty, culminating in emancipation from four centuries of foreign hegemony and the subsequent emergence of the modern Greek state. March 25 has become the day when Greece celebrates that liberation.

Monasteries were traditional hotbeds of insurrection against the invaders of Greece, and harboured freedom fighters from all walks of life, from brigands to shepherds. During the Nazi occupation, however, partisans were usually guerrilla fighters who left their communities and took to the hills and caves, carrying out raids to inflict damage that was more symbolic than actual, outnumbered and outresourced as they were by the invaders.

Until the late nineteenth century, Aghia Lavra housed approximately 1,000 monks, but by 1943 that number was greatly depleted. Mega Spilaion was at that time, and is to this day, a more sizeable community. Both became targets for destruction by an enemy bent on extirpating any spirit of resistance among the civilian populace.

Ostensibly in retaliation for a minor skirmish with partisans in the district - although, in all probability, had no such pretext presented itself the outcome would have been the same - the village of Kalavryta was overrun on December 6, 1943, and systematically plundered until it was stripped of every means of survival, from livestock to grain and oil. Contemporary reports describe how trainload after trainload of the Kalavrytans' confiscated means of sustenance went rattling down the mountain until nothing remained against the bitter mountain winter. Shops and homes and farms were stripped, and women were forced to surrender even their wedding rings. Those men and women identified as resistance fighters were hanged from plane trees in the village square. But all this activity was merely the prelude.

On December 13, all the survivors were separated into two groups. The women and children were ordered to proceed to the stone schoolhouse. The men and boys over the age of twelve were marched to a meadow called Kapis's field, overlooking the village. In scenes that seem in retrospect to prefigure much later events at Srebrenica and Beslan, an estimated one thousand men and boys were cut down by firing squads armed with machine-guns, while the schoolhouse with their women and children locked inside was set alight. As the smoke from their burning homes engulfed the town, women frantically tried to thrust their little ones out of the schoolhouse windows. At the height of the confusion, some person never identified, but believed to have been a German soldier acting without orders, opened a door of the schoolhouse so that those trapped inside could escape.

Fifty years later, I met one of the children who had survived the blazing schoolhouse. She had been snatched to safety by a priest, but, having been orphaned by the events at Kalavryta, was adopted and raised by a family in Australia before returning to live in Greece.

The women of Kalavryta fled the conflagration only to be confronted by the evidence of the massacre: over a thousand dead, leaving thirteen male survivors. The widows of Kalavryta dug graves in the frozen earth with improvised implements and their bare hands.

After the executioners had finished with Kalavryta, they marched - singing, it is reported - to the Monastery of Aghia Lavra, where those who were too old or infirm to have fled to safety, and those who had stayed behind to care for them, were executed beneath the same plane tree that had flown the banner of liberty in 1825.

Nor was Mega Spilaion, on the road below Kalavryta, spared a similar fate. In a ghoulishly sadistic twist, the entire monastic community, which included men in their nineties, were forced to jump to their deaths from the crags above the monastery. In the flames that gutted the monastery buildings, an irreplaceable collection of illuminated manuscripts and other artefacts was also lost to civilisation.

A total of twenty-four villages and hamlets in the Kalavryta eparchia were burned to the ground, and many of their residents slaughtered.

The schoolhouse in Kalavryta has since been rebuilt in accordance with the original specifications. It was reopened by the "architect" of the project, Minister for Culture Melina Mercouri, fifty years after the massacre at Kalavryta.

Just across the road from the schoolhouse stands the most famous kafeneion-zacharoplasteion (cafe-confectioner's) in Kalavryta - on first sight a cosy but spacious establishment serving sumptuous Greek pastries dripping with syrup. The walls, however, chronicle and commemorate the atrocities of December 1943, in text and images and testimony.

The proprietress, an imposing woman in black, the Hecuba of Kalavryta, is clearly of the martyred generation, and bears its sorrow and its pride in every fibre of her being and every lineament of her countenance. She presides over her establishment - permeated with fragrant aromas of cinnamon and vanilla, rosewater and almonds, coffee and woodsmoke, its shelves glowing with jars of preserved cherries - like a black angel.

But nothing can quite prepare the visitor for Kalavryta. Certainly not the charming little train, ducking in and out of tunnels, affording glimpses of crags and the wild Vouraikos gorge, the bed of a stream that cascades over rocks, carrying flotillas of russet plane and chestnut leaves on its clear ice-green waters. Not even the blackened pre-war sections of the rebuilt Mega Spilaion, should you happen to stop off there on your way to Kalavryta by road.

The bland postwar buildings of Kalavryta may deceive you into thinking this is just another pleasant Peloponnesian mountain village, popular with day-trippers at weekends as such places are.

In the black angel's kafeneion, however, you stand at an interface with history. When your consciousness has assimilated the broad outlines of the story, you cannot look at the schoolhouse with eyes unchanged. And when you have trudged uphill to the meadow where over a thousand men and boys were killed, and read the names inscribed on slabs of masonry, and stepped inside the shrine crowded with icon lamps, and absorbed the meaning of this site, the abysmal nature of what took place here in December 1943, you will retrace your steps in a different frame of mind from when you set out.

I have noticed that in places where the unthinkable has occurred, the atmosphere seems to retain invisible but palpable traces of those events. Kalavryta is such a place.

It is highly unlikely that a film could ever do justice to Kalavryta's experience. No film could ever hope to be commensurate with what the people of Kalavryta were forced to endure, and, to my knowledge, nobody has ever attempted to translate this theme to celluloid. It would be too harrowing. Too piteous. Too agonising to comprehend.

The enormity of the crimes against humanity committed here - which were crimes as much against the humanity of the perpetrators as against that of their victims - enters the consciousness as an obscene dark miasma, out of which ascends a black angel of liberty. Black is the mark of mourning, for the cost of liberty - here in Kalavryta, as in so many other sites of suffering and oppression - is life.

Winters have never been easy in Kalavryta, but spring is ushered in with froth of cherry-blossom, and summer brings the blood-red beads of fruit as promise and reminder.



* * * * *


Monastery of the Great Cave

Zachlorou, Kalavryta


Impact on the gaze
of that great gorge
whose river glistens,
threading from snowfields
on the distant range
in silver veins.

Impact on the rocks
far down of cassocked bodies
skulls and spines, the brethren
young and very old: a Totentanz
for Kommandants, a little prelude
to Kalavryta, the massacre.

Knowing this alters imperceptibly
what is seen, the act of seeing,
rendering each detail with more clarity,
precisely, so that the river entering
its chasm between high red walls,
the buildings of the monastery,
the gleaming snows, the cypress trees
echo their image endlessly on the retina,
cling to the eye, suspending for an eternity
the time to die


1996