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Return to Asi Gonia
actually. Ah, so you have the same name. Well, yes, I suppose we do.
Smith. But Julie had already claimed the opposite in another village.
We went in constant fear of exposure.
This sort of subterfuge does no good. Apart from landing you in
these genealogical complexities, it is in a way an insult to Cretan tolerance,
as illustrated by Daskalomarkakis. It is true that the foreigner is
very well placed; he gets more than his fair share of tolerance. And I
have often wished that my Cretan friends would be tougher and more
argumentative with xenoi, instead of letting politeness and respect for
those ‘with letters’ stifle disagreement; for this politeness sets up another
barrier, perhaps more formidable than the substantial cultural differences.
Frankness does no harm, given goodwill.
I wandered slowly up through the village to the ilex grove and the
spring. Pigs wallowed in the road, grunting evilly. The priest called to
me to come and drink a coffee; he had just returned from Athens and
was telling everyone about the Corinth canal, a marvel which he had
just seen for the first time. Stelios, his son, our old interpreter of three
years back, was on Chios now doing his military service, and married.
Up by the spring, a tall, dark man began to talk to me while the women
washed clothes. He was wrapped in melancholy.
‘Temptation has not left the world,’ he said, and pointed to St
George’s chapel where Brian and I had sheltered one rainy night: ‘Do
you have churches like that?’
‘In England ? Our churches are bigger, they have no icons.’
‘Why? What do you believe in?’
‘Much the same as you, many of us.’
‘In Jesus Christ? Everyone, all the world, should believe in Jesus
Christ, even more than in God, because Christ died to save us. What
man would do that?’
My world is full of evangelists. The preacher at Sphakia, a Methodist
who gave me a lift from Bedford to Bicester and told me the sin-laden
story of his life, inviting me to repent, and now Markos. He began to
tell me of St George’s local miracles, all of which I had heard before.
Finally he narrated an involved and marvellous tale about George
himself, which I compress.
‘George was chief general of the King of Cappadocia. Now the King
had ordered that all the Christians were to be killed. “Everyone is to
worship idols.” So the King arrested George; he didn’t want to kill
him, you see, he was such a valuable soldier. So George was tortured to
give up his faith.’
There followed an incredible series of tortures – fire, nails, the rack,
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