The Flight of Ikaros: Travels in Greece During the Civil War by Kevin Andrews

Author:Kevin Andrews [Andrews, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Published: 2012-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Taygetos—

Summer Lightning

“THE GENTLEMEN PASSENGERS are begged to mount the vehicle departing within five minutes for Corinth, Xylókastro, Aigion and Patras”—from the megaphone outside the ticket office a furry, dehumanized croak boomed over the little square. In the shadow of the bleak, high, brown façade of Saint Constantine’s Church travellers bound for various quarters of the Peloponnese waited over their morning coffee while ragged boys with shoe shine boxes sidled in and out and old men with trays of sweet meats strapped to their shoulders limped between the crowded tables. The sun had just come up and the trams of Athens were already starting on their noisy circuit in the neighbouring avenue. A bus drove up in front of the ticket office, and as soon as it was full the door was closed, the motor roared and it drove off. Another took its place and again the loudly filtered, granulated syllables burst from the megaphone: “The gentlemen passengers are begged to mount the vehicle now leaving for Corinth, Argos, Tripolis and Sparta.”

I was going back to Mistra for the first time in two years. Throwing a rucksack packed for the whole long summer ahead on to the bundles in the street, I joined the crowd pressing noisily into the bus. The familiar hush fell as a gendarme, sleek in his battleship grey, climbed in after us and turned the narrow eyes in his pouchy icon-face upon each passenger’s identity card and travel permit. He stepped back into the street without a word, then the driver climbed in and a sturdy, prosperous-looking young man with a camel’s-hair cap and a burnished mask of sunglasses sat down next to him; the ticket-taker, coming in through the door at the back, called “All set, Niko!” and the motors roared beneath the driver’s foot. The women with the head-cloths and the sun-dried faces crossed themselves three times as the bus lurched forward among the trucks, carts and tramcars where twenty-five centuries ago a road called the Sacred Way led out to the holy places of Eleusis.

Two years before it had taken a week to get to Sparta; today it took eight hours over the smooth macadam road built by the American engineers. The Corinth Canal was cleared and we rattled over the Bailey bridge without stopping to have our permits checked, though among the mountain passes in Arkadia I noticed newly built barracks and concrete gun-emplacements where in 1948 there had been only dug-outs. The passengers talked together as if they were in a kapheneíon, and I struck up an acquaintance with the man in the front seat, who inquired at length about my studies and said expansively to the others sitting behind him, “Here is a foreigner who is drawn by the unknown!” He hung his jacket on the knob of the windshield, and throughout the journey kept shaking and re-folding it to hang free of the door. We had lunch together in Tripolis. Then in the middle of the afternoon the bus

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