Mystras and Goethe, Together Again

A tiny bit of the medieval city Mystras

It’s Saturday morning and welcome to Greece!  I’ll be here every Saturday, god(s) willing.  How I got here (to Greece and MIE) was explained on Wednesday in a piece I did filling in for Yrsa, so if you’re interested in that sort of history please scroll down to “What’s in a Name.”  For a spot of more ancient history, please stay here.

Frescoes at Mystras

All my books in one way or another touch upon my home island of Mykonos, but Greece is a land with places of endless intrigues for the conjuring of thoughts mysterious and murderous. To some, the realities those venues have hosted far outstrip what most think believable, even in fiction.  But inspiration is out there, waiting to be discovered.

The Peloponnese

I’ve just returned from a few days in the southernmost part of mainland Greece, the Peloponnese, an area approximately the size of the American state of New Jersey. Originally a peninsula, it technically became an island when the Corinth canal was dug across its northern end in 1893.  The Peloponnese served as the setting for much of the true-life drama played out across ancient Greece.  In its southern, Laconia region stood Sparta, ancestral home to Spartan power that once rattled the ancient world much as its legend still dominates today’s.  That’s where I went searching for ideas for my new book.

Modern Sparta is a place decidedly different in locale and life from its antiquity namesake.  It sits on a plain along the Eurotas River between ribs of not so distant mountains running north and south.  The community is one based on agricultural, not war, and its groves of oranges and olive trees support twelve thousand souls still proud of their ancient heritage.

Modern Sparta Town Square

Mystras Castle Fortress

But to experience truly inspirational ancient insights you must travel northwest eight kilometers, to the mid-13^th Century Byzantine fortress city of Mystras, and its looming castle atop a foothill of massive Mount Taygetos. 

The old city and castle are wonderfully restored and maintained, and Mystras’ history reflects that of much of the entire region.  Following the Fourth Crusade the Franks built the fortress to defend the southeast Peloponnese, but by the mid-13^th Century Mystras was in Greek hands and remained so for 200 years until the Turkish conquest.  Let me put it simply: the goings on and battles during those years involving, emperors, knights, churchmen, and most other sorts would cross Dan Brown’s eyes. 

Hotel Pyrgos Mystra

In a Trip Advisor moment of digression, may I suggest you head on to relax in the adjacent more modern village of Mystras.  It has its own quaint charms and one of my new favorite inns of all time sits there.

From the mid-14^th to mid-15^th Centuries Mystras served as the heart and soul of the Peloponnese, so much so that at the end of that period some believed Mystras was the actual site of ancient Sparta, and by the 17^th Century that was the generally held belief.  It was not until the very beginning of the 18^th Century that Mystras regained its status as a separate and unique place, a source of mythical inspiration to travelers and artists’ souls.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Which brings me to Goethe.  In 1824, in his second part of Faust, he chose Mystras as the place for classic beauty “uniting” with romantic chivalry.  Trust me, I know that only because I read it in a guide book, BUT, Goethe’s words caught the essence of it’s time, at least that’s how it seemed to me as I sat amid it all reading these words:

 

So many years deserted stood the valley hills

That in the rear of Sparta northwards rise aloft

Behind Taygetos: whence as yet a nimble brook,

Eurotas downward rolls, and then along our vale

By reed beds broadly flowing, nourishes your swans.

Behind there in the mountain dwells a daring breed

Have settled, pressing forth from the Cimmerian Night,

And there have built a fortress inaccessible,

Whence land and people now they harry as they please.

The one catching my contemplative Goethe moment as that imperceptible dot on the wall below the site's upper parking lot is waving from the very top of the fortress. 

From Mystras it was on to Mani, a place the Turks could never conquer, and The Godfather would have called home had Mario Puzo been Mario Puzopoulos. But that’s for another week.

Jeff — Saturday

My Very First Time

Jeff--Saturday

It's Saturday morning and my best laid plans have left me high and dry (in several manners of speaking) insofar as posting the grand idea I had for today's post.  You see, I planned on writing it while flying from New York City to San Francisco for the kickoff of my California Book tour, but fate intervened in the form of food poisoning I picked up at the Newark Airport, and that experience consumed all of my attention for the ensuing six hours. Thus, my first reference to "high and dry."

By the time we gathered the car, the luggage, and the meds available at the nearest pharmacy, we barely had time to shower, regain composure, and drive to Janet Rudolph's Mystery Literary Salon in the hills of Berkeley for a wonderful evening shared with Cara, Lisa Alber, and two dozen inveterate fans of the genre.  That's the three of us up above, as photographed by Catriona McPherson.  

I'm told the homemade food brought by the guests was terrific, for I dared not partake in even a sip of water (my second high and dry moment).

This morning, stabilized as I feel, if I spend the time writing a blog post as opposed to taking Barbara to the promised San Francisco sights for enduring all she has over the past 24 hours (not ill, thank God, but putting up with one who was), I shall not only be left high and dry, but likely drawn and quartered as well.

Cara, Keith Raffel, Barbara, Frank Price

So, in substitution, I offer you my very first official post as a member of the Murder is Everywhere team.  It went up on November 6, 2010, titled, "Mystras and Goethe, Together Again."  My how time flies when you're having a good time! Hope you are, too.

                                                                         *****

"MYSTRAS AND GOETHE, TOGETHER AGAIN"

A tiny bit of the medieval city Mystras

It’s Saturday morning and welcome to Greece!  I’ll be here every Saturday, god(s) willing.  How I got here (to Greece and MIE) was explained on Wednesday in a piece I did filling in for Yrsa, so if you’re interested in that sort of history please go to “What’s in a Name.”  For a spot of more ancient history, please stay here.

Frescoes at Mystras

All my books in one way or another touch upon my home island of Mykonos, but Greece is a land with places of endless intrigues for the conjuring of thoughts mysterious and murderous. To some, the realities those venues have hosted far outstrip what most think believable, even in fiction.  But inspiration is out there, waiting to be discovered.

The Peloponnese

I’ve just returned from a few days in the southernmost part of mainland Greece, the Peloponnese, an area approximately the size of the American state of New Jersey. Originally a peninsula, it technically became an island when the Corinth canal was dug across its northern end in 1893.  The Peloponnese served as the setting for much of the true-life drama played out across ancient Greece.  In its southern, Laconia region stood Sparta, ancestral home to Spartan power that once rattled the ancient world much as its legend still dominates today’s.  That’s where I went searching for ideas for my new book.

Modern Sparta is a place decidedly different in locale and life from its antiquity namesake.  It sits on a plain along the Eurotas River between ribs of not so distant mountains running north and south.  The community is one based on agricultural, not war, and its groves of oranges and olive trees support twelve thousand souls still proud of their ancient heritage.

Modern Sparta Town Square

Mystras Castle Fortress

But to experience truly inspirational ancient insights you must travel northwest eight kilometers, to the mid-13^th Century Byzantine fortress city of Mystras, and its looming castle atop a foothill of massive Mount Taygetos. 

The old city and castle are wonderfully restored and maintained, and Mystras’ history reflects that of much of the entire region.  Following the Fourth Crusade the Franks built the fortress to defend the southeast Peloponnese, but by the mid-13^th Century Mystras was in Greek hands and remained so for 200 years until the Turkish conquest.  Let me put it simply: the goings on and battles during those years involving, emperors, knights, churchmen, and most other sorts would cross Dan Brown’s eyes. 

Hotel Pyrgos Mystra

In a Trip Advisor moment of digression, may I suggest you head on to relax in the adjacent more modern village of Mystras.  It has its own quaint charms and one of my new favorite inns of all time sits there.

From the mid-14^th to mid-15^th Centuries Mystras served as the heart and soul of the Peloponnese, so much so that at the end of that period some believed Mystras was the actual site of ancient Sparta, and by the 17^th Century that was the generally held belief.  It was not until the very beginning of the 18^th Century that Mystras regained its status as a separate and unique place, a source of mythical inspiration to travelers and artists’ souls.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Which brings me to Goethe.  In 1824, in his second part of Faust, he chose Mystras as the place for classic beauty “uniting” with romantic chivalry.  Trust me, I know that only because I read it in a guide book, BUT, Goethe’s words caught the essence of it’s time, at least that’s how it seemed to me as I sat amid it all reading these words:

 

So many years deserted stood the valley hills

That in the rear of Sparta northwards rise aloft

Behind Taygetos: whence as yet a nimble brook,

Eurotas downward rolls, and then along our vale

By reed beds broadly flowing, nourishes your swans.

Behind there in the mountain dwells a daring breed

Have settled, pressing forth from the Cimmerian Night,

And there have built a fortress inaccessible,

Whence land and people now they harry as they please.

The one catching my contemplative Goethe moment as that imperceptible dot on the wall below the site's upper parking lot is waving from the very top of the fortress. 

From Mystras it was on to Mani, a place the Turks could never conquer, and The Godfather would have called home had Mario Puzo been Mario Puzopoulos. But that’s for another week.

—Jeff

A Return to the Mani

 

Vathia, a Mani fortified settlement

Jeff--Saturday
 

Over the past two weeks, three friends separately asked me what I thought of the Mani region of Greece. Soon after that, I noticed several articles written about how desirable the area has become for tourists and those looking for a place to live the idyllic Greek life.  I mentioned that coincidence to my wife and she said, "I'd like to live there too."  Well, we're not moving any time soon, but with the apparent groundswell of attention the Mani is receiving, I decided it's time for me to repeat what I first wrote more than a decade ago about this magical region.  I'm sure the magic hasn't changed -- yet.

 

If Mystras (see this post) was the heart of Peloponnese history, Mani was its fist.  It is the mountain-spine middle peninsula on the trident tip of Greece’s most southern mainland part, on the same latitude as Sicily and pointing across the Mediterranean at Libya.  It is where ancient Spartans are said to have settled, and if you’re wise, do not quarrel with a Maniot who makes that claim.

Unlike much of the Peloponnese, Mani has no grand, established sites such as Mystras or Epidauros, but nor did ancient Sparta, whose inhabitants lived a warrior life disinterested in the great edifices so important to their northern neighbors and Athenians.  Besides, much of what Spartans built disappeared amid the region’s earthquakes and millennia of scavengers for building materials.

A Maniot fighter

What Mani does offer is a present day spiritual presence giving life to a history far grander than most legends.  Say “Mani” to a Greek and the usual response is “tough, proud, enduring people.”  Greece’s war of independence against the Turks began there in 1821, and though the history of the Peloponnese (and Greece as a whole) is largely one of occupation by foreign powers, the story goes that Mani was never occupied (essentially true), never paid taxes (at least not that much), was a refuge for the politically persecuted (willing to fight, I assume), and in some parts has not seen a piece of land sold to foreigners (tough to verify, though proudly claimed). 

Mesa Mani landscape

A few weeks ago [ed. note: make that eleven years] I was in the southwestern part of Mani, called Mesa (inner) Mani doing “inspirational” research for a new book.  Mesa Mani runs inland from the Ionian Sea, across arid, rugged land, onto the majestic, north-south Taygetos mountain range.   This is where ancient stone towers loom practically everywhere above the land, an ever-present reminder of a violent past. 

Mani tower

The generally four to five story tall towers (each a pyrgos in Greek), offered defensive positions to families against bandits, pirates, and foreign invaders.  But far more often they served to protect families from their neighbors, for Mani was a land where the concept of family vendetta was so deeply ingrained in its culture that rules existed on how, whom, and when not to reek vengeance against an offending family.  For example, those lucky enough to be a doctor or a priest were considered too valuable to the community to serve as a permissible target for vengeance by another family.

There are said to be 800 ancient towers still standing in Mani, some with roots back to the 13th Century.  That might explain why many find Maniots among the friendliest and most courteous people in Greece.  It’s probably a serendipitous, positive result of living in a society where to offend likely led to something far worse than a nasty letter to your boss.

Gerolimenas harbor with Hotel Kyrimai at point

Road to spiritual experience

I stayed in Gerolimenas, a picture-postcard harbor village of less than sixty inhabitants, at a world-class inn once a seafront warehouse for agricultural commerce between Peloponnese and the outside world.  The same family that built and ran the warehouse in the early 19^th Century created and now runs the inn.  On the morning of my departure to Athens, the owner suggested I travel south a bit more, toward Cape Tenaro at the very tip of the peninsula, where the Ionian and Aegean seas meet.  “It is a spiritual experience that will take you back in time,” he said.  And so I did, toward I knew not what. 

Vathia

The photograph at the top of this post is not a painting, nor is the one to the left.  They are of the hillside village of Vathia.  It exists exactly as you see it.  As I stood there, contemplating a Harry Potter scenic against the region’s Mad Max-like history, a funeral procession passed out of Vathia directly behind me.  Mani has mesmerizing landscapes, charming places, and friendly people, yet I could not help but wonder if that funeral bore some relation to its fierce history.  I’m just cursed with such thoughts: I think murder is everywhere.

Pause for groaning to subside.

A final resting place

I never made it to the southern tip, for on the way there I passed the funeral procession.  Cars were parked along the side of the road, at the top of a steep, rocky incline.  Men below were carrying the coffin toward a mountain church along the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea.  I saw no cemetery, just the church.  The only other visible sign of life was up ahead, an isolated, distant taverna on a tiny beach.  I stopped there, but didn’t get out, just sat for a while.  I turned around and drove back toward Athens. I had no need to go further, I’d found my inspiration.  Besides, I’d be back; there were too many mysteries here to ignore—past, present, and future.  

Distant Cape Tenaro where the Ionian meets the Aegean

If you’re interested in more about this fascinating part of the world, I came across Mani: A Guide and History, on a website created by John Chapman.  He seems to have spent a large part of his life immersed in Mani’s history and ways.  Though I cannot vouch for the accuracy of his observations, nor do I dare challenge them, for in describing how vendetta vengeance could be taken against any family member of the perpetrator, he writes, “The only exception to this 'collective' form of vengeance was in the case of slander where vengeance had to be meted out on the perpetrator.” 

I’d prefer not to test that sort of thinking.

 

–Jeff

Mani Get Your Gun

Vathia, a Mani fortified settlement

 If Mystras (see last Saturday’s post) was the heart of Peloponnese history, Mani was its fist.  It is the mountain-spine middle peninsula on the trident tip of Greece’s most southern mainland part, on the same latitude as Sicily and pointing across the Mediterranean at Libya.  It is where ancient Spartans are said to have settled, and if you’re wise, do not quarrel with a Maniot who makes that claim.

Unlike much of the Peloponnese, Mani has no grand, established sites such as Mystras or Epidauros, but nor did ancient Sparta, whose inhabitants lived a warrior life disinterested in the great edifices so important to their northern neighbors and Athenians.  Besides, much of what Spartans built disappeared amid the region’s earthquakes and millennia of scavengers for building materials.

A Maniot fighter

What Mani does offer is a present day spiritual presence giving life to a history far grander than most legends.  Say “Mani” to a Greek and the usual response is “tough, proud, enduring people.”  Greece’s war of independence against the Turks began there in 1821, and though the history of the Peloponnese (and Greece as a whole) is largely one of occupation by foreign powers, the story goes that Mani was never occupied (essentially true), never paid taxes (at least not that much), was a refuge for the politically persecuted (willing to fight, I assume), and in some parts has not seen a piece of land sold to foreigners (tough to verify, though proudly claimed). 

Mesa Mani landscape

A few weeks ago I was in the southwestern part of Mani, called Mesa (inner) Mani doing “inspirational” research for a new book.  Mesa Mani runs inland from the Ionian Sea, across arid, rugged land, onto the majestic, north-south Taygetos mountain range.   This is where ancient stone towers loom practically everywhere above the land, an ever-present reminder of a violent past. 

Mani tower

The generally four to five story tall towers (each a pyrgos in Greek), offered defensive positions to families against bandits, pirates, and foreign invaders.  But far more often they served to protect families from their neighbors, for Mani was a land where the concept of family vendetta was so deeply engrained in its culture that rules existed on how, whom, and when not to reek vengeance against an offending family.  For example, those lucky enough to be a doctor or a priest were considered too valuable to the community to serve as a permissible target for vengeance by another family.

There are said to be 800 ancient towers still standing in Mani, some with roots back to the 13th Century.  That might explain why many find Maniots among the friendliest and most courteous people in Greece.  It’s probably a serendipitous, positive result of living in a society where to offend likely led to something far worse than a nasty letter to your boss.

Gerolimenas harbor with Hotel Kyrimai at point

Road to spiritual experience

I stayed in Gerolimenas, a picture-postcard harbor village of less than sixty inhabitants, at a world-class inn once a seafront warehouse for agricultural commerce between Peloponnese and the outside world.  The same family that built and ran the warehouse in the early 19^th Century created and now runs the inn.  On the morning of my departure to Athens, the owner suggested I travel south a bit more, toward Cape Tenaro at the very tip of the peninsula, where the Ionian and Aegean seas meet.  “It is a spiritual experience that will take you back in time,” he said.  And so I did, toward I knew not what. 

Vathia

The photograph at the top of this post is not a painting, nor is the one to the left.  They are of the hillside village of Vathia.  It exists exactly as you see it.  As I stood there, contemplating a Harry Potter scenic against the region’s Mad Max-like history, a funeral procession passed out of Vathia directly behind me.  Mani has mesmerizing landscapes, charming places, and friendly people, yet I could not help but wonder if that funeral bore some relation to its fierce history.  I’m just cursed with such thoughts: I think murder is everywhere.

Pause for groaning to subside.

A final resting place

I never made it to the southern tip, for on the way there I passed the funeral procession.  Cars were parked along the side of the road, at the top of a steep, rocky incline.  Men below were carrying the coffin toward a mountain church along the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea.  I saw no cemetery, just the church.  The only other visible sign of life was up ahead, an isolated, distant taverna on a tiny beach.  I stopped there, but didn’t get out, just sat for a while.  I turned around and drove back toward Athens. I had no need to go further, I’d found my inspiration.  Besides, I’d be back; there were too many mysteries here to ignore—past, present, and future.  

Distant Cape Tenaro where the Ionian meets the Aegean

If you’re interested in more about this fascinating part of the world, I came across Mani: A Guide and History, on a website created by John Chapman.  He seems to have spent a large part of his life immersed in Mani’s history and ways.  Though I cannot vouch for the accuracy of his observations, nor do I dare challenge them, for in describing how vendetta vengeance could be taken against any family member of the perpetrator, he writes, “The only exception to this 'collective' form of vengeance was in the case of slander where vengeance had to be meted out on the perpetrator.” 

I’d prefer not to test that sort of thinking.

Jeff — Saturday