Rough Island Story By SIMON • RAVEN ? from Isle of Hydra
is some three hours' sail I from the Pira:us. In winter there is only one boat a day, but in summer there are many more because this tiny island is now one the most celebrated tourist-traps in the Near East. With good reason: it is rocky and dramatic in appear- ance, it has an archetypally cute harbour, there are no roads and therefore no cars; highly coloured representatives of the arts abound, what is more, and the fisher-boys are notoriously co- operative. The food is a nightmare, but even this is an added attraction to those who want to feel they are off the beaten track In fact, of course, they are nothing of the kind—you can get by very well without a word of Greek. But all tourist resorts have their own particular con- fidence trick; and Hydra's is the false appearance of being (my dear) remote. Not but what other attractions are genuine enough : there are occa- sional scenes of pagan licence in the 'best' taverna, during which (with these eyes I have seen it) people positively take their clothes off; and there was a much-discussed sermon by a local bishop which was devoted in its entirety to the iniquities of a bar which opened—and closed —last summer. But in the main Hydra as seen by travellers is phoney; it is a trompe-rwil island sticking out of a painted sea: until, that is, one starts inquiring into the real habits of the real inhabitants—into what goes on when winter comes, when the last epicene giggle has hovered and died in the October air.
For in the winter Hydra is a great deal odder than the casual summer visitor could conceive. Not because it has changed, but because the wrappings and trappings have been removed (to be carefully stored until next April), and because there is now room to see. There is room to see a barren island with a handful of lean and savage occupants, whose only livelihood cotnes from the sea and from a few grudging patches of earth which have been cleared, with something near heroism, of flint and rock. There is leisure to observe that the demeanour of the people, so bright and hospitable when there were tourists to be cosseted and cheated, is now bleak and
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cheerless, that their , eyes, which promised so much during the dog days, are now suspicious and cruel. 'What is he doing, this stranger, lingering on into the winter? Cannot he see he has outstayed his welcome? There is nothing left here for him. Though meanwttile, of course, we can continue to take his money. . .
This hostility, so unexpected and upsetting to anyone who has been told from his infancy that the Greeks regard xenos as a sacred word, has. its roots in the island's history. For the Hydriots (Albanians by origin) were, and in spirit remain, pirates. They chopped down their fine trees to build ships, they sailed the iEgLean and then all of the Eastern Mediterranean; they were brave, cunning and ferocious; and if the merchants wanted their fleets to ride safely home—to Venice, to Heraclion, to Acre—then they must pay the Hydriots and wear a smile. By the end of the eighteenth century all sea-trade from Corcyra to Alexandria to the Bosphorus was under Hydriot control. The little island grew rich. The islanders built strong and graceful houses, some of which survive. But they did not grow soft; their swift ships continued to put out at dawn, to return at evening laden with money and goods. Their power and wealth, however, did not endear them either to the Turks or their Greek subjects. Hydra was getting much too big for its boots. Attempts were made to teach a lesson to the insufferable. Hydriots—attempts which were answered by cannon from the harbour mouth. Nor was it an island—it could not be—to wel- come strangers. It was Hydra contra munduni.
It is well known that the only way of uniting the Greeks is to sound the trumpet for war. Then all Greeks, however fractious, make common cause without question and without stint. And so, when the War of Independence began, even the inhabitants of Hydra turned patriot. More so, indeed, than many others. They stripped their island of its last trees, built more ships, sent these and the splendid fleets they had already to sweep away the Turks. They pursued the cause of free- dom with single-minded passion. Freedom was duly won but by this time the wealth of the Hydriots--their money, their trees, their ships— was spent.
To the new government in Athens, wary and jealous, this was far from inconvenient. Petitions for compensation from the once proud island were turned aside. Hydra began to starve. Popu- late outcry at length compelled the authorities to do something for the gallant Hydriots; but it was too little and too late. The population of 35,000 (today it is only 2,000) was already shrinking daily, while the noble houses of the admirals began to tumble down the hill towards the harbour. There was bitterness and decay. The islanders were now hostile for a different reason : strangers, once warned away lest they should pry on wealth, were now hated because they came to mock at poverty. There was, in any case, nothing for them to eat. Until within lining memory no stranger could ,ct loot on Hydra. But at last, a, communications improved and manners ,clitcriett. the hest trichle.of,ttaN.eliers came—bringing money. There had not been anY money on the island for a long time and it Was to be had for a little politeness. A little island esprit, the Hydriots found, went a long way. So they put aside their grimness, and the trickle of travellers grew to a stream, and the stream to a rushing torrent, a torrent washing down gold.
• So in the summer all is merry and bright. The privateers, in a fashion, sail once more. But in the winter the old distrust, the old fear that strangers are there either'to pry or mock, returns as the days shorten. For there is much that the Hydriots would sooner went unobserved—which, in the confusion of summer, does go unobserved. But in the bare winter the harsh outlines of island life are not easily concealed. It becomes plain, for example, that the local women are still kept more or less in purdah—a proceeding not un- common in the islands and provinces of Greece, but here carried to a vicious extreme. Pre- pubescent girls and ageing widows you will some- times see on the quayside, marriageable virgins and young wives almqst never. Women stay in the house to cook and clean and breed. They do not even do the marketing—their men do that. A woman may get as far as the nearest pump or water-tank and there meet other women in like case. Further than this her social life does not extend. The men, married or unmarried, go out in the evening accompanied only by male friends; and since they are deprived, from adolescence until marriage, of female company, homo- sexuality and incest are both common, the former at least being regarded only as a subject for mild gossip. In the summer, if they are lucky, the young men might find foreign women, but these are seldom in their first youth. In the winter they must pursue their homosexual courtships in the alleys and the taverns, while the married men (habit dies hard) take a genial and even active part in the proceedings. Fights are frequent, exhibitionism of the crudest kind a commonplace.
Nor would the Hydriots wish it known how very near to starvation they still exist. Not all of them see much of the tourists' money. For those that do not, winter will bring little more than olives and bread, perhaps some rancid white cheese. It will bring long, idle days—it is often too rough to fish—spent crouching, without re- freshment, in the cafés (for it is of course obligatory to leave the women in the cold houses to shift for and amuse themselves). Life is hard and even shameful:, not something for strangers to be privy to. Small wonder that resentment grows and there are ugly incidents : the children of a foreign couple beaten up by local toughs, the windows of the American painter smashed as he sits at dinner. For the island is showing its evil nature—its hatred, its envy, its bitterness at lost fortune and presently enforced servility.
And so it is that the spirit of the old pirates still shows in Hydra—but a maimed spirit now, thwarted and driven in upon itself. There are no longer wide seas to sail and rich prizes to bring home. The spirit of piracy must now be confined to the exploitation of summer customers; or, in the winter, to the sly, dangerous hatred, formerly turned on strangers who coveted Hydra's wealth, now reserved for foreigners who stay too long on the island—those ■Nho :ire still there after the Hydriots have put away their summer charade and started to inspect their empty cupboards.
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