The Hill of Kronos by Peter Levi

Author:Peter Levi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The landscape of this poem is the same few rocks and pine trees repeated again and again, with an abandoned shrine, a square building buried in whitewash, over and over again up to the sky. It is and is not characteristic of Greece. The pine trees have been burned. This is a kind of nightmare, a place of despair. There is hope and there is courage in the poetry of George Seferis, but the hope is no higher than the heads of the grass, and the courage is most obvious at the moments of worst tragedy, for instance at the fall of Crete to the Germans. It is not only his own language but his country and its history that George Seferis understood better than other people. His meditation was more profound. He was conscious of the Furies, the avenging demons. We are talking of a very poor country, and what was once a good and simple people, under the burden of an intolerable history. During my early years in Athens that history was taking a new, appalling turn. As I began to sink a little deeper into Greek life, disaster was imminent. At first I heard of it only in anecdotes I could hardly piece together: a rigged election, the screaming from the prison island of Makronisi that could be heard at certain villages on still nights. But people did not on the whole reveal the worst about their experience of life to an Englishman. I knew that Nikos Gatsos had sold his books in order to live, during the great hunger. I knew about the lorries that the Germans sent round every day to clear the streets of the bodies of those who had died of starvation. I knew about the gambling on the pavements, the two civil wars, the strong conservative government, the intrigues. The first fresh political rumour I ever heard in a café was about the death of a left wing member of parliament at Saloniki. He was said to have been murdered by the army or the police.

The attempt to cover this gruesome assassination, combined with a quarrel between Karamanlis and the royal family, brought down the government. For the first time since the nineteen-thirties there were genuinely free elections, and old Mr. Papandreou became prime minister. Most of my friends were cock-a-hoop. In the British School old heads nodded dubiously. He was a liberal veering through socialism towards the left for support. He stayed in power for less than two years, but in the country they were years of somewhat breathless optimism. George Seferis was not optimistic; he maintained an angry and formidable withdrawal from political affairs, and some of the things he had to say in private about the politicians were hair-raising.

At that time I made two new friends, one at George’s house and the other at a New Year party at the house of the Director of the School. Through George I met Iannis Tsirkas, an Egyptian Greek novelist with the sweetest and saddest eyes and the most serious and humorous face I have ever seen.

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