Today we approached the lost city of Mystras (Μυστρά), wandering through deep gorges. When we attained the place marked on the map, we found only horses grazing on a hillside scattered with ruins. Nothing remains of the capital we are told it was and whose narrow streets seem to have been carelessly destroyed by its own inhabitants.
There were, it seems, three ages. In the first, a shining sanctuary was built to worship the gods; to this age belong the carved white stones, the pure air of the summit and the silhouette of the cypresses. Without the stiff weight of history on their bodies, the first men of the place lived in the present and loved the houses they built, or at least respected them. But as time went by, nothing happened there and the shadow of tradition grew longer and longer, until it was lost in the horizon of their heads. Thus they gradually forgot the reason of their world and became deformed. The men of the second age no longer obeyed the streams and the animal omens, with their eternally present vitality; instead they became guardians of their own civilisation and of the religion of Christ, enclosed in the still word of the priests.
Under the atrocious sun we now enter the landscape of deformed men, the realm of the snake, sheltered in the rags of its ancient marble shell. Hundreds of years ago the people of the second age built their houses here like beavers, paralysed by the horrible vision of a perfect and unrepeatable past. Slowly, plaster replaced alabaster and the iron axe followed the bronze horses: everything became stones, crosses, quarrels, nothingness. Under the blue sky and without looking each other in the eyes, the inhabitants of the hillside turned all the beautiful reliefs into pieces of rock and turned them into the feverish mortar of their houses. The children were born old and miserable, and since they were small they played at hide-and-seek among the stone flowers and the great carved cylinders, behind which they laughed and drew obscene faces.
These were the mysterious presences that marked their childhoods, the ancestral instruments of their innocent play that, little by little, vanished in their imagination. They forgot the columns and the shining friezes as we forget nature, which always accompanies us in silence. And they also gradually became adults, older if possible, and learned to see in them a brick, an anvil, a tile... incapable of understanding their beauty, they became beavers. And for hundreds of years they rebuilt the city made of nameless things, a city that was always oblivion.
One could say that eventually came the third age, the age without people, like the empty but relieved whisper of death. The sun, the wind and the rubble are enough only for the animals, and for the animals they remained. Mystras is not a ruin because there never was a city here: it is made of the same material as the streams and the hills.
