Villa Ariadne

  THE VILLA ARIADNE

  DILYS POWELL

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THIS BOOK is set in Crete, and Crete is changing. Some of the changes I have lately seen, but more are coming, and the traveller may not always recognise the places I describe. My Crete is chiefly an older Crete. And the people I have known – in the light of the passing years they too change. I have tried to tell a truthful story; where I could I have sought out the witnesses; but there are some I have failed to trace. In one instance at any rate I have preferred to leave the legend, if legend it is, untouched. In writing about Patrick Leigh Fermor I have set down what the Cretans said to me. It seemed a pity to risk destroying the charm of their tales, and I have not asked him to confirm or deny; I hope he will forgive this omission.

  I will not make a great show of apologising for the inconsistent spelling of Greek words and names. As a rule I have used the form familiar to me – Herakleion rather than Iraklion – or the form which retains some trace of its origin; I pronounce Ayia, but I write Hagia. My transliteration of place-names thus is erratic; I have abandoned the attempt to distinguish between the nominative and the accusative of Christian names or between the masculine and the feminine of surnames; and for readability I have left out all the accents.

  I am indebted for help from many people, both British and Greek, whose names occur or whose stories are recorded in the book; I thank them all. I owe especial thanks to Dr Joan Evans, who allowed me to quote from the Evans letters and on whose book Time and Chance (Macmillan) I have relied in sketching Sir Arthur’s early life; to the late Hilda Pendlebury, who without restriction handed over to me her husband’s letters, as also to her daughter Joan Pendlebury; and to Mrs Doreen Dunbabin, who entrusted to me her husband’s manuscript account of his experiences in Occupied Crete. The British School of Archaeology at Athens has generously given permission for quotations from Evans’s records, published in the School Annual, of the first years of excavation at Knossos. I have referred in the text to my indebtedness to the late Stanley Moss’s book Ill Met by Moonlight (Harrap), and I have quoted briefly from Mary Chubb’s Nefertiti Lived Here (Geoffrey Bles). I should like to thank also Miss Edith Clay, Mrs M. J. Thornton, Miss Euphrosyne Sideropoulou, Mr John Stanley and Mr Stelio Hourmouzios.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Map

  Prologue

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  i

  FROM HERAKLEION the road, leaving the ramparts, ran south-east beside a ravine, past a straggle of shops and little houses with gardens, between vineyards and fringes of eucalyptus towards dry gradual hills. I took a ticket to Knossos, and in a quarter of an hour the bus was pulling up by a café opposite the entrance to the Palace of Minos. Then I realised that I should have got out fifty yards or so farther back. I had not seen the place since 1935, and this was 1958; you forget, in twenty-three years, the exact position of a gate.

  ‘Where,’ I said – I knew, but I asked all the same – ‘where is the Villa Ariadne?’ The conductor was blank. ‘The Villa Ariadne,’ I said again, ‘where the archaeologists stay, the English archaeologists?’ Blank again and a shrug. As I moved to get out I tried once more. ‘The Villa Ariadne, Sir Arthur Evans’s house?’ ‘Ah, Evans’s house! Wait!’ He shouted down the bus. ‘The lady wants Evans’s house!’ ‘Evans’s house!’ the driver repeated. ‘Wait!’ He leaned out of the window and backed. ‘There,’ said the conductor, ‘there is the entrance.’

  I pushed open the door in the wall and went into the courtyard. A woman whom I did not know answered when I knocked at the door of the lodge. The Director, she said, had gone to Rethymnon, and since it was a Sunday the students too would probably be out for the day, but I could go up to the Villa and look for myself. Morning glory swarmed over the wall by the road; it was cool in the courtyard. But at the top of the few steps which skirted the little whitewashed building everything was thin, everything thirsty. Wire netting enclosed the lodge garden. Inside its irregular triangle long grass wove a mat over the soil; a few exhausted hollyhocks struggled out of the weeds. I went through the gate in the fence and up the path towards the Villa. Pines, reeds, desiccated palms, oleanders, bougainvillea, dusty olives; long ago, fond preserving hands had set fragments of antique statuary here and there among the trees – an empty shrine, a plinth, a broken capital. Headless but majestic, a marble Hadrian posed in the shade; a turkey with her brood scratched round the base at his sandalled feet. Emaciated, the shrubbery dangled spiky branches. A pomegranate had put out a few parched flowers, but there was no sign of the hibiscus whose blossoms we used to pick on breathless July afternoons, nothing was growing in the urns on the terrace where amidst the scent of jasmine we used to dine.

  But the Villa itself – that looked unchanged: the polygonal blocks of sand-coloured stone outlined in mortar, the flat roof against the background of pine trees, the dark shutters and the half-basement, the sense of suffocation, stubbornly Victorian in the Mediterranean landscape. Somewhere a dog barked furiously and rattled his chain. The front door stood open. I climbed the flight of stone steps and went in. On the right-hand wall, a replica of a relief from the Palace – the noble head of the charging bull. Beside it, a commemorative plaque: dates, names. Nothing else: floors bare, ceilings cracked, walls peeling. The passage at the end of the hall led past the long dining-room; sparse furniture, the table minimally laid with the necessary frugality of an archaeological expedition.

  An unwarranted ghost, I crept downstairs to where, for coolness in the Cretan summer, the bedrooms had been contrived below ground level. Through an open door I could see the stone floor naked, the shutters drooping from their hinges, green light filtering through windows overgrown with creeper; nothing except a camp bed, a tray of sherds and a suitcase exposing a trail of shirts and socks. Time had sucked the house dry.

  When I went out two young men were walking up the path from the lower house. In that arid garden they were unmistakably English. Two archaeological students from a British excavation party; simply to look at them reminded me how long I had been an alien from their society. The dog barked again frantically. He was in view now – prickly black coat and old white muzzle – bouncing on the roof of his kennel; and a woman came from the servants’ entrance behind the terrace to see what was going on. Yes, she said, she was Ourania. I asked if she remembered me: ‘I think,’ I said, ‘I used to know your husband.’ No, she said, at that time, though she was married in 1933, she did not work at Knossos but lived up at her village. But the name I gave, Payne – she knew that. And her husband? Ah, Manoli had gone to his own village, to Lasithi, for the day.

  ‘I will come back tomorrow,’ I told her. On the bank behind the Villa the pines had shed a dark slippery carpet of needles. I scrambled up and looked towards the slopes which hid Fortetsa village and Herakleion. A donkey was tethered by the tumbling stones of a broken hut, and in the field beyond it a group of women in headscarves were cutting the corn. In the still, warm, aromatic air I could hear them calling to one another. Only the house and its garden were dying.

  I walked down to the gates at the bottom of the Villa drive, but they were locked, and I went back the way I had come. Farther down the main road, cars and buses were drawn up in a car-park outside the Palace of Minos; a pavilion sold embroideries and orangeade; there was a ticket-office. I paid and went in, up the leafy approach, across the courtyard with the walled pits on the left and the trees on the right shading mysterious trenches. A maze: but I remembered not so much the inv
olutions and the dead ends as the pall of history pressing bloodstained and heavy on summer days; and the Cretan light settling dense, like the red local wine; and the hot smell of dust in the paths; and the afternoon shadows creeping thick as tar from the walls. For me it had always been afternoon in the Palace, late afternoon, men trudging home from the dig in the cemetery behind the hill, the pines solid and gold-fringed in the dying sun, and as I clambered about the reconstructed passages something sacrificial in the air; one half-expected a roll of drums. In those days it had been comforting to escape from the deserted labyrinth back to the company at the Villa.

  But now the Palace buzzed with visitors. Tourists with cameras and handbooks; a bearded young man in shorts and a blue shirt, a peasant’s straw hat on the ground beside him, sat sketching under the cypresses beyond the pits. Taking a short cut, I climbed over a wall into the complex of buildings. In the Central Court a polyglot guide was lecturing to bemused faces, English, French, German; abruptly he turned and made off, trailing his party behind him down long stairways. I waited till the footsteps had faded, then wandered without plan. Along corridors, down steps, past light-wells, under colonnades, through porticos, out to terraces – at last I stopped short on a high jagged edge. Still a maze; it was a struggle to find the way back. Here and there vegetation was reasserting itself. Liquorice plants rooted in crevices, and gold and yellow daisies rampaged over the Court. Behind the reproductions of the frescoes on the walls of the royal rooms the swallows had nested; wings flashed and whirred as they flew between the Minoan columns. But the huge restored Palace itself, the old-and-new Palace, Evans’s Palace – that was still arrogantly alive. Storey upon storey, new walls propping up old, twentieth-century pillars raising roofs which might have fallen before Troy – war and the tremors of the earth had scarcely marked it. Time had made it accessible, that was all.

  On my way out I stopped to look at the bust under the pine trees near the entrance. Stirred by the wind, a branch gently brushed the back of the bronze head. ‘Sir Arthur Evans’, said the Greek inscription, ‘The people of Herakleion in gratitude’.

  ii

  I never stayed at the Villa Ariadne while Sir Arthur Evans was there himself. Indeed I came to Crete late, several years after my husband Humfry Payne had begun taking me on my first novice excursions in the islands and on the mainland of Greece. At the time of those early trips Humfry was still a student at the British School of Archaeology at Athens, and I – not a student, just a student’s wife with a knowledge of the classics which the most euphemistic friend could not have called as much as rudimentary – was still struggling to find my bearings in archaeological society. But the unknown Villa was already part of my background. A pale gold phantom, it presided over remote arguments. At dinner in the Athens students’ hostel its name brought a touch of fable, and sitting silent over the rissoles, embarrassed by my endless ignorance, I imagined oriental splendours.

  In my first spring in Athens the air seemed to me full of talk about Crete. Sites, villages, monasteries, mountains, dates, digs, sherds, seals, tablets, scripts, everything rang confusedly in my head. Even when we set out for a trip in the country Knossos went with us. Staying for a night or two at Old Corinth, where the Americans were digging, we found among our companions the English architect and draughtsman Piet de Jong, who worked sometimes for the American School of Classical Studies, sometimes for the British School, sometimes for Evans in Crete. It was from Piet that I first heard stories, already merging with legend, of feudal state at the Villa Ariadne.

  ‘There was a train of donkeys bringing snow from Mount Ida for the sherbet,’ he said, pursing his mouth and giving his subdued little laugh. The amused eyes with their spectacles beneath the prominent eyebrows, the long fine nose, the whole spare, self-contained face was happily bent on the joke, and for a moment I almost believed him.

  And the names. Long before I saw the setting I was aware of the cast – Duncan Mackenzie, Evans’s assistant; Gilliéron, who had been occupied in some way not clear to me with the restoration of the Palace at Knossos; Wace, the Cambridge scholar who had dug at Mycenae and was now locked with Evans in a ruthless and to me incomprehensible controversy. In 1927 John Forsdyke, later Director of the British Museum, was finishing the exploration of a Minoan necropolis, discovered a year earlier by Evans himself, on the slopes beyond the stream which bounds the Palace to the east. Humfry also was digging in the Knossos area, and when that summer I joined him in Athens for a holiday Arcadian in both the metaphorical and the geographical sense of the word, he often talked about the people at Knossos. But several years were still to pass before I saw any of the Cretan characters in the story of the Villa. In treasured visits to Greece, in breathless trains and buses, on mule-back and on foot Humfry took me travelling the width and length of the Peloponnese. We crossed mountain ranges, we took ship to the Archipelago – but never to Crete.

  Not, that is, together. In the summer of 1929 Humfry was once again digging there, this time at Eleutherna in the foothills of Mount Ida. He was appointed Director of the Athens School that year, and had the dig proved important he might have gone on working in Crete. There was indeed one rediscovery – a reliable and responsible Cretan foreman, Yanni Katsarakis, who had worked for the School long before. But the soil at Eleutherna held no great treasure. Instead, the main British excavation for some time was to be on the Greek mainland at the Heraion of Perachora. There for the next four years Yanni worked with us, and Eleutherna and Mount Ida joined Knossos, the Palace of Minos and the Villa Ariadne in the haze of gossip and legend and archaeology which for me enveloped all Crete.

  Not that my grasp of the other business of the School was much firmer. In retrospect the incidents and encounters of the first season as Director’s wife in Athens have meaning for me, but at the time the weeks went by unrecognised. The names of eminent American and European scholars jostled one another in my head. With the early days of temperate sun, of wild tulips and almond blossom, hordes of tourists called at the Director’s house and, mistaking me for an archaeologist’s mate suitably equipped, vainly questioned me about the validity of Evans’s reconstructions at Knossos or the relation of the egg-and-dart motive to fertility rites. Students set off on trips to places with strange names, while with my handful of Greek words I took the tram down to the city, performed inessential shopping and made statutory requests for my residence permit. Once at the police station – though this I think must have been in some later year – I came across a young man even more disorientated than I was. Angular high cheekbones, deep brown hair, a fine dark flush of the skin and an off-hand, remote splendour of physique – in the crowd he looked lost, and hearing him speak in English I asked if I could help. He was, it turned out, a student newly arrived at the School: Tom Dunbabin, from Oxford and before that Tasmania. I directed him to the right room, supplied him with the right phrase, and went home to lunch disproportionately pleased with myself.

  And Tom Dunbabin, too, was to be part of the Cretan story. But that was years later. Meanwhile as I grew familiar with the names I began little by little to know the characters in the tale. In England, where we spent part of each year, Sir Arthur Evans used occasionally to invite us to a week-end at Youlbury, his house on Boar’s Hill outside Oxford. Some people, it is true, were never more to me than distant figures in a myth. Evans’s lieutenant Mackenzie was one I never saw, though there was an occasion when, confusing me with the wife of some earlier Director – a woman no doubt with the qualifications for membership of archaeological society which I never managed to acquire – he wrote me a charming and gallant letter.

  The stories about him merged into my picture of the Villa: Mackenzie complaining that the nightingales kept him awake and employing a boy to throw stones at them, or commenting sourly on the prevalence of romantic human attachments. Those were the days when women in the academic world were apt to be regarded as intruders; and on the news, blameless one would have thought, of an engagement between a yo
ung Cambridge archaeologist and another of the Athens students, ‘Never a week passes,’ Mackenzie was reported as remarking in his soft Scottish accent, ‘without some fresh scandal at the British School.’

  But by the time I at long last made a first trip to Crete he was no longer there. In the summer of 1929 he fell ill and was obliged to retire. His work at the Villa had been dual. Not only had he been Evans’s assistant and indeed right-hand man, he had served as Curator of Knossos, a post which in some manner not at the time clear to me was under the control of the British School at Athens. Ironically enough the man elected to follow him in the job was one of those he had marked down as symbolising the decline of archaeological morals. Coincidental with Humfry Payne’s appointment as Director in Athens came the appointment as Curator at Knossos of John Pendlebury, by then married to his partner in ‘scandal’.

  The Pendleburys and Humfry had been contemporaries as students at the School. Now they were colleagues with official as well as friendly relations. It was usual for the Director to visit Knossos to discuss the various responsibilities of the School; it was usual for the Curator to stay at the School on his way out to Crete. The Director took up residence in the autumn, the Curator not until after the New Year. When John and Hilda Pendlebury came through Athens the fresh spring afternoons were beginning to dazzle, the processionary caterpillars were spinning their cocoons in the pines, and the four of us would play vociferous games of tennis on the hard court in the School garden. Then the season’s business would disperse our party. Humfry would already be planning the year’s campaign at Perachora, and Hilda and John would take ship to Crete and their own enigmatic preoccupations with lustral areas and protopalatial houses.

  They were established at Knossos – it was their second season – when I was taken on a first visit to Crete. It was early in the year, with the days cool, unsettled. I was not yet at ease with the Pendleburys, and the nervousness of spring tightened the nervousness I have always felt on coming to an unfamiliar house and on having to find my bearings in a strange society and strange surroundings. The talk, the questions to be settled, everything was foreign to me; in an obscure disquiet I listened while around me echoed phrases about the tenancy of vineyards, the evasiveness of lawyers, the incidence of earthquakes and the friable nature of archaeological remains.