Frangokastello; Komitades

12: MYRTHIOS TO SPHAKIA CHAPTER 12 MYRTHIOS TO SPHAKIA; FRANGOKASTELLO; KOMITADES [Myrthios: the Hatzidakis family] I first came to Myrthios on 23 September 1916, landing at Plakias and then going down to Plakias to pick up the trawler again.1 As long as I had known Professor George Hatzidakis at Athens I had known that he still kept up his ties with some village in central Crete, and on this day I learned that he came from Myrthios. There I saw his old father, Nicholas Hatzidakis, who was then just a hundred years old.2 He survived for two years more. At this time he was blind, his eyes having been surgically removed some ten years before. He still heard fairly well, and had full use of his memory and wits in general. Only he did not speak much: his voice was weak and high, but then all the Hatzidakis family have these rather high-pitched voices. I noticed it in even a quite distant cousin whom I met at the monastery of Gorgolaini, where he was a monk.3 For the rest old Hatzidakis could not walk, but sat up in a chair. His face was much shrunken and his skin was a dark brown. He was not bald. I saw him again looking much the same in 1917. In 1918 he died. When I saw him in 101U [sic: most likely 1917] he was chatting with another old man some twenty or more years younger than himself but also blind. It is the custom in Crete to put a male baby into the arms of the bride at a wedding in order that she too may have male children. This second old man, whom I found visiting the Hatzidakis house, had been the baby carried by old Hatzidakis’ bride at his wedding some eighty years before. In 1918 the second elder was dead also. The Hatzidakis family is to my mind so remarkable that I collected at Myrthios and from the professor at Athens a few notes about their history. They were not always called Hatzidakis, a name meaning the son of the pilgrim and extremely common in Crete. A few generations ago they were called Zavetis and lived not at Myrthios but at Agios Yannis, a village above the gorge which leads down to Myrthios and on the way from Myrthios to Retimo. But the family owned a mill, still in existence, in the lower part of the gorge just to the west of Myrthios, and to work this with greater convenience they moved house and came down to Myrthios. The second member of the family at Myrthios built the lower storey of the house in which they are still living. The upper storey is later: in those days there were no such things. This man was a coppersmith by trade and went as a pilgrim to Jerusalem no less than three times. He was in consequence known not so much by his proper surname but as the pilgrim smith, Khatzi Chartchas, which is the Cretan form of χαλκιάς. As to the word Khatzis for a pilgrim, it is of course the Arabic and Turkish Hajji, applied in the first instance to Moslem pilgrims to Mecca and in Greece under Turkish rule in popular language to pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre, who are known in the official Greek of the church as proskynitai. It was from this very famous pilgrim then that the family took their present name of Hatzidakis. This man, though of course in every way a Christian, was recognised as a brother by the Janissaries at the price of entertaining them in his house when they came to the village. He was a sort of honorary Janissary. This was a custom of the Janissaries in their later days: it seems too that they had a particular friendliness for coppersmiths on account of their reverence for their soup-kettles, which they treated almost as the regimental fetish, whence the colonel was called Tchorbaji, the man who provided the soup. The cook was an important official. Their regular sign of revolt was to upset the regimental 1 12: MYRTHIOS TO SPHAKIA kettles. However this may be, it seems that the Pilgrim Smith contrived in the worst periods of Turkish oppression to keep his house going. And the very house where he entertained the Janissaries is still occupied by his great-grandson. The son of the Pilgrim was the old Nicholas Hatzidakis whom I saw. He lived all his life in the village, working his mill and fishing in the sea. He had a notable brother called George who died before I came to know the family. This George was a priest at Agios Yannis, the original village of the family. He died an old man about 1898. He was a famous man with a great reputation. [Written at Preveli, 7 April 1918:] He was famed as a powerful exorcist who could drive out demons. For this purpose he had a very large cross and it is said that he used to prod the sick man with this, crying “πού ακούεις το διάβολο, παιδί μου;” [“Where can you hear the devil, my child?”] The patient would cry out in terror, “πουθενά, πουθενά” [“nowhere, nowhere”] and leap out of bed cured. This is told as a sort of joke. The same priest George was sent for to Sphakia to clear a house of ants by his exorcisms. He read and chanted and after a while called for a cauldron of water and told the people to dig in the floor of the house. The ants’ nest was thus found and they all drowned in the hot water. He had concluded as he was chanting, by his own common sense, that the ants must have a nest under the house and then they found it. These two stories are characteristic of the half-faith, half-sceptical attitude of the Greek peasant. This priest was said to be χερικάρης, a lucky man, one who prospers in whatever he puts his mind to, a man who has a good χερικό. See note in folklore section.4 Myrthios, 30 May 1917 His [= Nicholas’] sons: the eldest John, professor of mathematics at Athens, now in his decline. His son Nikolaos is also a prof of mathematics at Athens, a demoticist; he came to Cambridge for the mathematical congress and has children. Other sons are Emmanuel, who lives at Myrthios, and Constantine, who is dead and was a doctor at Canea, and George the linguist, who is I think the second. The youngest is the demodidaskalos of Myrthios, Panayotis, my host there several times, married with children, the eldest being Nikolaos who was a soldier in this war. Note at Sphakia, 20 July 1917 Pan[ayotis] Hatzidakis [who lived with his father] at Myrthios told me that his brother George the philologist is οψιμαθής [a late learner]. He used to bring corn up from Plakias, where the caiques landed, to the mill in the valley below the gorge with a donkey and a mule. His only learning was got at the demotiko skholeio [primary school] and helping his father when he sang in church by acting as kalonarkhis, the boy who chants as a sort of prompter always about half a phrase ahead of the singer, to the great confusion of the listeners. Then, in 1866, he went as a refugee to Athens and went to the Ellinikon skholeion [secondary school] and to the university, got a scholarship and went to study in Germany. He is now (in 1917) nearly 70, born therefore in 1848, and in 1866 was about 18, so it may be said that up to 18 or more he only knew how to read and write a little. They escaped in a sailing vessel from Kόrakes, the beach below Rodakino where I set up the cross over Lt Smith’s grave.5 The old father stayed in Crete all through the 1866 and 1869 insurrections.6 2 12: MYRTHIOS TO SPHAKIA I saw at Myrthios, in the house of a woman who came from Sphakia, one of the special ovens which those women build and are apparently a speciality of Sphakia. First the round floor of the oven is made, and on it a conical or dome-shaped pile of small stones is built up to be the size of the inside of the future oven. The stones are then covered first with leafy twigs and then with clay. The place where the door is to be is left uncovered and marked off by building in a round basket set on its side. Then, when the clay is quite dry, the basket is taken away and the stones taken out by way of the opening, one by one, until the whole oven is cleared. The twigs and leaves are to keep the clay clear of the stones. At the top of the oven they make or leave a hole so that when they heat the oven in the usual way with a fire inside there may be a proper draught. When the bread is baking this hole is closed with a clay cap, so that all the heat is retained. I afterwards saw another of these ovens at the monastery of Agios Charalambos close to Frangokastello. [Damnoni (Δαμνόνι)] The entrance to the Pool of Karavos at Damoni, 7 April 1999; the old waterline indicates that the land has risen (as noted by Dawkins) 3 12: MYRTHIOS TO SPHAKIA The Pool of Karavos at Damoni today7 The village of Myrthios lies at the mouth of the gorge already described, and on the slopes looking down upon the sea.

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