And If
The Owner Of The Land They Inhabit Ill-Treats Them, They Set Fire To
Their Huts And Go Elsewhere." An Admirable System, Even Nowadays.
One would like to be here at Easter time to see the rusalet - those
Pyrrhic dances where the young men group themselves in martial array,
and pass through the streets with song and chorus, since, soon enough,
America will have put an end to such customs.
The old Albanian guitar of
nine strings has already died out, and the double tibia - biforem dat
tibia cantum - will presently follow suit. This instrument, familiar
from classical sculpture and lore, and still used in Sicily and
Sardinia, was once a favourite with the Sila shepherds, who called it
"fischietto a pariglia." But some years ago I vainly sought it in the
central Sila; the answer to my enquiries was everywhere the same: they
knew it quite well; so and so used to play it; certain persons in
certain villages still made it - they described it accurately enough, but
could not produce a specimen. Single pipes, yes; and bagpipes galore;
but the tibia: pares were "out of fashion" wherever I asked for them.
Here, in the Greek Sila, I was more fortunate. A boy at the village of
Macchia possessed a pair which he obligingly gave me, after first
playing a song - a farewell song - a plaintive ditty that required, none
the less, an excellent pair of lungs, on account of the two mouthpieces.
Melodies on this double flageolet are played principally at Christmas
time. The two reeds are about twenty-five centimetres in length, and
made of hollow cane; in my specimen, the left hand controls four, the
other six holes; the Albanian name of the instrument is "fiscarol."
From a gentleman at Vaccarizza I received a still more valuable
present - two neolithic celts (aenolithic, I should be inclined to call
them) wrought in close-grained quartzite, and found not far from that
village. These implements must be rare in the uplands of Calabria, as I
have never come across them before, though they have been found, to my
knowledge, at Savelli in the central Sila. At Vaccarizza they call such
relics "pic" - they are supposed, as usual, to be thunderbolts, and I am
also told that a piece of string tied to one of them cannot be burnt in
fire. The experiment might be worth trying.
Meanwhile, the day passed pleasantly at Vaccarizza. I became the guest
of a prosperous resident, and was treated to genuine Albanian
hospitality and excellent cheer. I only wish that all his compatriots
might enjoy one meal of this kind in their lifetime. For they are poor,
and their homes of miserable aspect. Like all too many villages in South
Italy, this one is depopulated of its male inhabitants, and otherwise
dirty and neglected. The impression one gains on first seeing one of
these places is more than that of Oriental decay; they are not merely
ragged at the edges. It is a deliberate and sinister chaos, a note of
downright anarchy - a contempt for those simple forms of refinement which
even the poorest can afford. Such persons, one thinks, cannot have much
sense of home and its hallowed associations; they seem to be
everlastingly ready to break with the existing state of things. How
different from England, where the humblest cottages, the roadways, the
very stones testify to immemorial love of order, to neighbourly feelings
and usages sanctioned by time!
They lack the sense of home as a fixed and old-established topographical
point; as do the Arabs and Russians, neither of whom have a word
expressing our "home" or "Heimat." Here, the nearest equivalent is la
famiglia. We think of a particular house or village where we were born
and where we spent our impressionable days of childhood; these others
regard home not as a geographical but as a social centre, liable to
shift from place to place; they are at home everywhere, so long as their
clan is about them. That acquisitive sense which affectionately adorns
our meanest dwelling, slowly saturating it with memories, has been
crushed out of them - if it ever existed - by hard blows of fortune; it is
safer, they think, to transform the labour of their hands into gold,
which can be moved from place to place or hidden from the tyrant's eye.
They have none of our sentimentality in regard to inanimate objects.
Eliza Cook's feelings towards her "old arm-chair" would strike them as
savouring of childishness. Hence the unfinished look of their houses,
within and without. Why expend thought and wealth upon that which may be
abandoned to-morrow?
The two churches of Vaccarizza, dark and unclean structures, stand side
by side, and I was shown through them by their respective priests, Greek
and Catholic, who walked arm in arm in friendly wise, and meekly smiled
at a running fire of sarcastic observations on the part of another
citizen directed against the "bottega" in general - the shop, as the
church is sometimes irreverently called. The Greco-Catholic cult to
which these Albanians belong is a compromise between the Orthodox and
Roman; their priests may wear beards and marry wives, they use bread
instead of the wafer for sacramental purposes, and there are one or two
other little differences of grave import.
Six Albanian settlements lie on these northern slopes of the Sila - San
Giorgio, Vaccarizza, San Cosimo, Macchia, San Demetrio Corone, and Santa
Sofia d' Epiro. San Demetrio is the largest of them, and thither, after
an undisturbed night's rest at the house of my kind host - the last, I
fear, for many days to come - I drove in the sunlit hours of next
morning. Along the road one can see how thoroughly the Albanians have
done their work; the land is all under cultivation, save for a dark belt
of trees overhead, to remind one of what once it was. Perhaps they have
eradicated the forest over-zealously, for I observe in San Demetrio that
the best drinking water has now to be fetched from a spring at a
considerable distance from the village; it is unlikely that this should
have been the original condition of affairs; deforestation has probably
diminished the water-supply.
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