Part XI
48
...that abode of Greeks, that unreassuring land.
Virgil, “Aeneid”
THE TERRA D’ÒTRANO was the last part of Apulia to be conquered by the Normans and still has something unmistakably Greek about it. After losing Ravenna in the eighth century, Byzantine Italy, re-organised as the Theme of Lombardy, was ruled from here by a strategos (or general) until 975 when the catapanate was established at Bari. The strategos worked closely with the archbishop, who sometimes represented him. In the tenth century Archbishop Vlattus of Òtranto led an embassy to the Zirid sultan at Mahdia in Tunis to buy the freedom of Apulian slaves – inspired by his sister being in the sultan’s harem – but when he returned privately to redeem more of them he was put to death.
The navy of Nicephorus Phocas (963–69) routed the Arabs. “I alone command the seas”, claimed the Emperor, who began the Greek colonisation of southern Italy, settlers flooding in under Basil Boiannes during the next century. Discreet contact with Constantinople lingered on until the Turkish conquest of Greece, while Mass was said in the Greek rite up to the Counter Reformation. Even today, although the language has almost ceased to be spoken, certain Greek customs survive south of a line from Ostuni to Tàranto . The most obvious example is harvesting olives in the Greek way. The trees are barely pruned so they grow very high and the ripe fruit is left to drop into nets spread on the ground below instead of being picked by hand as in the Terra di Bari.
The underground churches contain some of the Byzantine frescoes that are among Apulia’s greatest treasures. During the eighth century Byzantium forbade celibacy and the veneration of icons. When monks were ordered to marry or lose their eyes, 30,000 fled to Italy, founding small monasteries in caves, especially in Calabria and the Terra d’Òtranto. Sicilian monks, refugees from Islam, joined them in the ninth century. They decorated the churches they carved into the rock with frescoes of Christ, the Virgin and the Saints. The tradition continued for centuries.
The grotto church of San Biagio near San Vito dei Normanni owes its preservation to an enlightened landowner putting a door over the entrance. This was the church of a group of hermits and, judging from its size – over forty feet long – served a large community. Signed by the artist Daniel with the date 1197, the frescoes are unmistakably Byzantine, and Charles Diehl thought that, to-gether with the magnificent Archangel Michael at San Giovanni nearby, they were the most important in the Terra d’Òtranto. He blamed the destruction of many other frescoes on the navvies who built the railways. Using the cave churches as shelters where they could light fires, they seem to have taken a fiendish enjoyment in disembowelling the painted saints or gouging their eyes out. San Biagio had a lucky escape.
Converted to the Latin rite during the seventeenth century, few surface (as opposed to underground) churches in Apulia retain any traces of their Byzantine past. The exquisite little church of San Pietro at Òtranto is an exception, with drums and cupolas, and some of the Greek cycle of frescoes – the Last Supper and the Harrowing of Hell. The fifth century church at Casarano has been enlarged and its walls redecorated with Western frescoes, but the brilliantly coloured Byzantine mosaics are still in the dome and chancel, the dome dotted with stars. There is also the Romanesque abbey of Santa Maria di Cerrate, south of Brìndisi, which although built by Normans belonged to the Eastern rite, as you can see from its frescoes and from an altar inscribed in Greek.
On the other hand, there are Greek grotto churches throughout the stony hinterland of the Salentine peninsula, secret, haunted places that are often very hard to find, sometimes underground, sometimes dug into a bank or the side of a cliff. They stretch in a diagonal band twenty-five miles wide from Roca Vecchia in the north to Poggiardo and Ugento in the south. Some are locked, the key kept by a seemingly mythical custodian, while others have frescoes that are visible only by the light of a powerful torch. Often it is difficult to recognise them as churches or chapels, especially when they are used as cattle-byres or tool-sheds. Among the most important are those at Vaste, Giurdignano and Supersano. The earliest frescoes, from the tenth century, are in the church of Sante Marina e Cristina at Carpignano Salento, while the most beautiful are in a small museum in the public gardens at Poggiardo – having been taken from the nearby grotto chapel of Santa Maria under the town centre, discovered when a lorry fell into it in 1929.
You can best see the slow transition from Byzantine to Western above ground, however, at Soleto, near Galatina, where the tiny chapel of Santo Stefano is filled with frescoes, mostly from the mid-fourteenth century. The Last Judgement was obviously done by a Greek, but others could have been painted by some obscure follower of Giotto. The Byzantine saints are westernised – St Nicholas, St George, and St Onophrius with his loin-cloth and long white beard.
In contrast, the campanile of the chiesa madre at Soleto, built in about 1400 for Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, is totally Latin. Although Raimondello had been all-powerful here, Janet Ross was told that his campanile was the tomb of “some great king, whose name is not known, he died so long ago.” She thought Soleto “so eastern-looking with its one-storied, flat-roofed, white houses, that I expected the people to speak Arabic.”
Early Greek settlers from Tàranto called Gallipoli on the Ionian coast the ‘beautiful city’ and it still has enormous charm. It fell to the Normans in 1071 but was not totally subjugated for another sixty years, the Greek rite being used in its churches until the sixteenth century. It rose against Charles of Anjou in 1268, 34 rebellious barons being besieged in its castle for six months and hanged as soon as they surrendered. It beat off the Turks in 1481 but was occupied by the Venetians four years later, although briefly. The Spaniards gave the castle four great round bastions; mounting heavy cannon, these guarded the harbour and the landward side of the island on which the city is built. The last siege was in 1809, when the castle stood up to a bombardment by the British Navy.
“Here are fish and exquisite meat of every sort,” we are told by Abate Pacichelli, who says that English and Dutch ships put in to Gallipoli every day to buy olive oil. According to de Salis, in the eighteenth century the streets were narrow and dirty, and harbour facilities virtually non-existent, although the port was a centre for exporting oil from all over Apulia, stored in rock cisterns. Keppel Craven thought it “the most opulent and gayest town upon the coast. The inhabitants do not succeed six thousand in number; but they are easy in their circumstances, lively and merry, and in general well informed.” However, “Consumptions and spitting of blood are rather frequent here, occasioned by the great subtlety of the air, which is ventilated from every quarter.” He liked the pleasant suburbs on the mainland, now under ugly modern buildings, their gardens reminding him of “those so often seen round English ornamented cottages”, with “plants that will scarcely live out of a hothouse in our climate.”
Craven also noticed good paintings in Gallipoli’s churches. The cathedral still has a fine collection of pictures by a local artist, Giovanni Andrea Coppola (1597–1659), whose work was admired by Riedesel. Coppola’s house can be seen in Via Nicetti, a yellow corner building with an ornate doorway, which Riedesel visited to see more of his paintings.
Gallipoli is joined to the mainland by a bridge built in 1603, fifty years after cutting the isthmus to make the city impregnable. It is possible to drive round the old walls, but better to walk since it is no more than a mile and the view marvellous. You can see the island of Sant’ Andrea and, on a clear day, the Calabrian mountains across the Gulf of Tàranto.
In the triangle formed by Gallipoli, Òtranto and Lecce, Griko is spoken at a few places. Greek visitors have difficulty in understanding this Italiot Greek, which is really a separate language of its own, with many Italian words. It has no literature although poems and songs are sometimes published, printed in the Latin alphabet. As late as the 1970s, 20,000 people spoke it at Calimera and the surrounding villages. It is odd to hear young women talking Griko in the early twenty-first century.
In addition to the descendants of the Greek colonists of the tenth and eleventh centuries and of the refugees from northern Apulia in Norman times, Greek speaking Albanians settled on the vast estates in the south granted by King Ferrante in 1460 to their leader, George Castriota Skanderbeg. A street in Gallipoli is still named after his soldiers, Via Stradiotti – the famous ‘stradiots’ or Albanian light cavalry.