The Art of Peter Huby adhoc Issue 08: The Lancaster Guardian Articles Then and now: ten years in black shade of an olive tree. Over a couple of days we arranged through the undergrowth. the money over the (GarveyWilliams’) Greece In May 2002 whilst motoring through telephone, something called an equity Just inside the rusty gate to the land we spot Greece in an ancient Peugeot on a year release loan, using our house in Lancaster a tap wired to the trunk of a tree. A whole Linda and I moved to Greece in August long jaunt around Europe, we stopped as collateral, and that was it, done. We year has passed since we received a letter 2004. In October of that year I began off here and pitched our tent on an olive owned an olive grove: no house, no from the mayor authorising our water supply writing monthly pieces for the Lancaster terrace outside the village with a sublime water and the track from the village barely and we have been negotiating with a local Guardian about life here. Sometime in view out over the bay to the distant hills of passable, but beautiful, beautiful. engineer by email to get a connection to 2008 I stopped. Messinia and the Taygetos range rising the village tank. The pipe was connected mistily behind. yesterday, we gather later. What strikes me when I reread these pieces of writing, is how much has changed in just We stayed for three weeks, sleeping in Getting out of the car we turn on the tap a few years. The Greek economy is now in our little tent and sheltering from the heat and water gushes out almost hot. Quite a state of collapse. The lives of the people I of the day under broad olive sheets strung remarkable. We laugh out loud. wrote about in the newspaper articles have between the trees, whilst we explored Mani changed too, and I find that I am not the and Messinia by car. The terrace where we Unpacking the car on the same terrace same either. had our encampment was for sale, in fact where we camped last year, we make a a big chunk of the valley side was for sale- cup of tea with the new water. Below us we My attitude to life here has, inevitably, about four acres….and 200 olive trees. notice that there is fruit on the fig tree and evolved. So, what follows is a series of most of the figs are ripe. We split open the transcripts of the articles I wrote, to which I Richard and Lisa Garvey Williams, who soft fruit and lick out the strange red flesh, have added more recent thoughts in italics. had bought this land with a view to opening like people in a DH Lawrence novel. a holiday retreat, had been obliged to Our House at Prineas The newspaper articles are not in any strict abandon their project. The price they were Almost all of these pieces were typed on a order, partly because some of the original asking for the land was, we thought, very So, after a year back in England, having computer at an internet café in Kalamata and clippings didn’t have a date, though I have fair and at some point during our stay Linda sold our Lancaster house, given over our sent off directly to the editor of the newspaper. tried to make it coherent. and I looked at one another. jobs/commitments and said a temporary The other machines in the café were given over farewell to friends and family- we are to computer games and the local boys were Oct 2004. Megali Mantinia. We can do this, we thought. hoping for a stream of visitors- and here we enthusiastic players, so the atmosphere tended to are again, bumping down the track from the be frenetic. I didn’t often make notes beforehand. Megali Mantinia stands above steep olive village. This partly explains the slightly fractured style. terraces about a kilometre from the blue bay of Messinia. The foothills of the Taygetos Nobody has been on the land for over a It was only much later that we got an internet Mountains rise behind the village. year and it feels a bit like Sleeping Beauty’s connection at the house. castle, overgrown with burnt brown prickly On August afternoons it bakes, and a stuff. The unpruned olive trees, green and kind of somnolent silence hangs over the shaggy, hang over the virtually invisible landscape. The only things that move are track and swags of green olives brush the ears of a donkey as it stands in the Megali Mantinia over the windscreen of the car as we nose Oct 22 2004 Niko and earshot begin to bleat anxiously and Niko All this belongs to Herbert, who is Austrian. Five years ago, Herbert took Niko back stands up to shout at them. They go back to For 37 years he was a long distance truck to Austria with him, the first time Niko had Herbert their grazing, reassured by the sound of his driver, and now, at 66, a farmer and a been out of Greece, and arranged for voice. recluse. He lives here alone, alone, that is, him to have dentures made there. At this Our nearest neighbour, or at least, the except for his animals: two gigantic German time Niko had only two teeth left in his person who owns the land which gives The life of a shepherd here follows a shepherd dogs, Attila and Suloh: a horse: mouth. Now he has a flawless set of white on to ours, is Nikos Abramis. He has the traditional pattern. He stays with his flock, ducks: geese: and 37 cats. He has been teeth and his standing in the village is terraces above us on the valley side.Nikos, often moving considerable distances as here for eight years and only in the last three unquestioned. who is seventy, cultivates his olives - he has the sheep move about in search of good years has he started to build a house for a thousand trees around the district - and he grazing. He is the father of his flock, the himself. He used to live in a caravan. The Much has changed in the lives of Niko and is also a shepherd, with a flock of fifty or good shepherd. new house, a small structure resembling a Herbert, of which more anon. sixty sheep. Tyrolean chalet (Herbert comes from Tyrol) When he is ready to leave, he shouts to has a wall a yard thick, for ‘isolation’, he Nov 19 2004 Wildlife them again and they materialise on the says.It is a while before we twig that he track. He wanders off in his straw hat and means insulation. I thought I would write something about his split trainers in a sea of sheep. the wildlife in southern Greece, though Herbert has been very generous with us, perhaps I should say at the outset that I am The nearest actual dwelling to ours is about ferrying building materials from Kalamata, no expert, and I have a tendency to take a quarter of a mile down the track to the donating plant cuttings and vegetables an anthropomorphic view and to interpret sea, a marvellous sprawl of provisional from his garden, as well as sacks of siegen what wild creatures do as if they were really buildings, ancient Mercedes trucks, flower scheisse, goat shit, for fertiliser. human beings in disguise. beds, vegetable plots, palm trees and tree Nikos Avramis sized geraniums. He exchanges goat muck for geese with Take dung beetles. We see them on a friend of his in the mountains. Often, the track disposing of the droppings left When he comes down for a chat and a when we appear on his land he is boiling behind by Niko’s sheep, chunky labourers cup of coffee, he brings the sheep with him. pigs’ heads, which he gets cheap from manhandling their perfectly crafted spheres While he sits on one of our white plastic the butcher’s in the market, in a pan for his of dung across the stony slope. chairs, scowling at his coffee and trying to dogs. teach us village Greek, the sheep wander When the ball of dung begins to run away, off in search of whatever is edible beneath Though he has little Greek, and Nikos has as it frequently does, the beetle simply the olive trees. no German at all, the two men are close hangs on to it until it comes to a halt. He friends. They harvest their olives together He speaks to us in a kind of pidgin Greek, (she?) then climbs to the top of the dung in the winter months and Herbert’s truck is as if we were idiots, which I suppose in a ball, looks about, climbs down again a great asset in the village. Though they sense we are. Geros (old man) he says, and continues moving in the appropriate clearly get on well, between spats, Herbert pointing to his chest. Nonsense, we say, direction. is dismissive of Greeks in general. ‘They though in truth his chest is bad and he is have no logic’ he says, pointing to his thinking of selling his sheep. After a time, temple. the sheep which have wandered out of Herbert Loitzl Sometimes they work in pairs, like removal Ants, of course, are everywhere. We We still watch the ants. A couple of years ago, to seek each other out. The English expats men. Dave and Dave. Dung removal. step over ant highways all the time and on the track, I came across what I took to be the are a strikingly diverse group. Many of Reasonable rates. All orders quoted for. clearly there are many species, from tiny, aftermath of some kind of ant war or raid. For them, inevitably, are retired, with pensions Occasionally you see a little fellow scurrying barely visible creatures that flow along several metres around the entrance to a nest, to support them financially, though there is a around the operation like some keen their miniscule trade routes at great speed, the ground was littered with ant corpses, most living to be made here. Linda, for example, apprentice. like water, to more substantial insects you of them snipped in two. There were hundreds, has two part time jobs in Kalamata, wouldn’t necessarily want to get bitten by. maybe thousands. It was a salutary thing. teaching English, and we know people who In fact, or at least according to the only I am an admirer of ants, their relentless make furniture for a living, work for tourist short paragraph on dung beetles I could industry and their capacity for cooperation. December 3 2004. Expats. outfits, teach yoga and practice osteopathy. find, the pairs of insects are usually male and female (Dave and Dawn?) and the What does it say? Look to the ant, thou The expats, the other people from England Paul and Diana are typically untypical. They apprentice is really an offspring. It seems sluggard. Today, I see a cornflake beneath who moved here, have an interesting live above the village in an extraordinarily that they bury the spheres of dung and either the breakfast table apparently moving of its network. There are networks of Germans beautiful yurt, a genuine Mongolian lay eggs in them or eat them at a later date. own accord. The cornflake is much, much too, and a group of Dutch people we hear, specimen. Yurts, in case you are wondering, Apparently, they bury much more dung than larger than the two hero ants manoeuvring it and there are bound to be others. You can are circular tents used by nomads in central they will ever use. purposefully through the fallen olive leaves. see why they develop, these networks. Asia. Paul was a navigator in the R.A.F. EEWApart from anything else, it’s so much for twenty two years and Diana ran a One evening, Linda and I heard a very There are other moments: a green lizard easier talking in your native language. bed and breakfast place on Exmoor. After peculiar sound from the terrace above us: a racing obliviously beneath my chair in some years living in France, they moved sort of clunk-moan, clunk-moan sound. We pursuit of a dragonfly, which it then eats Of course, we speak to Greeks, in our here. Their shared passion is for the self climbed up to discover two tortoises mating, in sudden gulps, the wings hanging out at primitive way, to Niko our neighbour, to sustainable life, for home grown vegetables, though whether it was him or her that was either side of its mouth: a praying mantis Voula. Kosta, Takis, and other personalities solar power, composting toilets, etc. moaning we never discovered, since our sitting on my hat eating a fly as if it were a in the village, and I pass the time of day arrival had obviously put them off their hamburger and then cleaning its hands(?) with the assorted builders merchants and Pam and Dave live in a modest house stride. afterwards. They have an odd presence, suppliers I encounter in the course of making below the village with a boxer dog and We crouched a few yards off, waiting delicate and punctilious, like priests. Their the wooden house- which is almost finished, a grumpy terrier. Dave’s father was a voyeuristically to see if they would go to it heads move in a subtle puppet-like way as i.e. it has a shower and a toilet, though gamekeeper all his life and the son shares again, but no luck. they watch you with arch attention. some of the walls are still missing. his father’s rustic outlook. He keeps chickens and rabbits in hutches carefully crafted We have seen snakes on several occasions, See what I mean about anthropomorphic? Our relations with Greeks are entirely from old pallets. Their garden is a vista olive green jobs, about eighteen inches amiable, but spending an entire evening of vegetables: cabbages, leeks, sprouts, long, harmless, they say, though a dog, Now that Niko no longer grazes his sheep on struggling to understand what is being said, potatoes. Both of these couples live here Toto, belonging to Richard, the Englishman our terraces, we hardly ever see dung beetles. can be quite taxing. permanently, while other people also have who sold us the land, died after being bitten These days he only keeps a handful of ewes and a house in the UK and divide their time by a horn nosed viper. Everybody took to he would not be well enough to bring them down Sitting at a table with someone who speaks between the two. George Elliot and Mary wearing sturdy shoes for a while afterwards. the valley side to graze. He had, in any case, your language can be a great relief, and Wray, for example, live for part of the year It seems that the bite is seldom fatal to adult graciously given up bringing his animals down it comes as no surprise that the English in what used to be the old olive press, and humans, though. after we started to grow flowers and vegetables. people who live scattered across Messinia/ part of the year in North London. Mani tend to be aware of each other and Lisa and Richard, who live twenty kilometres Giorgia, his married daughter, a slightly to cross the weighbridge and unload our down the coast, are in their thirties. She was pinched presence, works energetically while sacks. in a hotel next to the World Trade Centre her ten year old son sits on a sack of olives in New York when the aircraft hit the two and makes no fuss. Kosta, Niko’s son, who The oil itself, when we finally sample it, is towers in 2001. Their move to Greece, in is some kind of bailiff for the law court in a revelation. It is green, for a start, quite a search of a saner existence, was a direct Kalamata, comes back at weekends to strong green, and cloudy for the first week consequence of that experience. work. or two, until it settles. The taste is surprisingly fruity with a sort of peppery bite. It is I did hear that the pilot of the Enola Gay, Kostas is an amiable person, unlike Giorgia, excellent. We pour some into a saucer, add the aircraft which dropped the atom bomb who treats us with chilly reserve. Herbert, a little salt and dip our bread. on Hiroshima, lived for many years in Dina, Niko’s daughter, using the fournos the Austrian, is also part of the team, though Messinia and died only recently. his relations with Niko are volatile. Herbert Olives. January 28. 2005. Hands on works in a permanent state of bemused Paul died maybe three years ago but Di stayed help. irritation with what he takes to be Greek The land we own is steep, the terraced side on in the yurt, to which has since been added a stupidity, while Niko seems puzzled by of a valley overlooking the sea. Olive trees picturesque huddle of more recent structures. The Once the olive harvest starts in December, Herbert’s noisy bouts of frustration. None of grow on the terraces and we have about garden is a delight. She takes in paying guests the sleepy landscape takes on a new life: the Abramis family drive, nor do they own a two hundred of them. We begin harvesting now, holiday makers, to supplement her pension. knots of people moving about on distant motor vehicle, so Herbert’s Mercedes truck terraces, the raw sound of chainsaws. is a great asset. Dave’s health failed and he and Pam moved back Beneath the trees, capacious olive to England, where he died. Pam hasn’t returned nets begin to appear, like fragments of A problem with his head, Niko confides to Greece and the house currently stands empty patchwork and the sound of voices carries to me as he sips his plastic cup of viscous and the garden is overgrown. clearly across the valley. White smoke rises coffee. He says the same about you, I say from the bonfires of branches. in my faulty Greek and Kostas laughs. Lisa and Richard are now back in the UK, living in Devon. We agree to work with Nikos Abramis and Linda and I finally begin work on our own trees, and pleasant enough work it is in this We meet hardly any new arrivals, these days his family on their olives- they own upward splendid landscape. When we have picked There is a definite sense of the ebbing of a tide. of a thousand trees- as a kind of brief The track from the house apprenticeship, before starting on our own about a dozen 50 kilo sacks of olives, which takes us maybe three or four days, Some other retired people that we know have trees- a piffling two hundred. Working with the olives in January and the whole process died or moved back to the UK, often for health Niko’s team will also, as we think, bring us we ferry them down in the pickup to the takes us some weeks, depending on the reasons, or they want to spend time with recently closer to a sense of the Greek outlook. factory on the coast where they are pressed. crop. Linda and I do it ourselves so it’s not arrived grandchildren. We hear that there Each sack yields about ten litres of oil. quick. are some hundreds of houses along the coast, Niko himself is the mastoras, the patriarch, belonging to foreigners, which are for sale at the dismissive and peremptory with his grown- The harvest is a very mutual business: There are two kinds of trees on our land: moment. up children, with Dina in particular, his everyone has olive trees, even if it’s only half one producing eating olives (We have dumpy, unmarried daughter, who works a dozen in the garden, and the yard of the about eight) while the rest produce olive George and Mary still visit regularly and seem to throughout in a thick coat and woolly hat, factory is noisy with voices as we wait in oil. We harvest the eating olives by hand have changed not at all. whatever the weather. the queue of battered, overloaded vehicles in November, using a ladder and a bucket, picking as many as we need for ourselves decant into two and a half litre cans and Well, finally, several years later, he was as good and then inviting friends over to help ship to the UK. We sell the oil for twenty as his word, and he appeared after the harvest themselves to the rest. pounds a can, which I understand is quite with Giorgo from the kafineion, to prune the reasonable. trees. Giorgo is a fast and capable guy and he Eating olives are bigger than the other worked for some days, and Niko paid him. The sort and quite inedibly bitter when you first We still harvest our own crop, until this year that work of pruning was still unfinished at the end pick them, so they have first to be soaked is, when things changed a bit. The annual pattern of the agreed days, so I offered to pay Giorgo to in water for up to a fortnight. The water for the past nine years has been that we pick our continue. At 35 euros a day, who could complain? is changed regularly until the bitterness is own olives, decant our own oil into cans, make Business is bad at Giorgo’s kafineon in the gone. Then comes the hocus-pocus with salt up a pallet and ship it to England for sale to village, and he needs the work, I say to myself, and vinegar -everybody seems to have a friends and family. smugly. different way of doing it- after which they We had other paid help from Alexandros, Ismini’s can be stored in olive oil or salt water. This arrangement wasn’t ideal, partly because grandson, who recently left university, and has People put in fancy stuff like garlic and we don’t know from year to year, what the yield yet to find a permanent job. He needs the work, I herbs sometimes. would be- it has tended to go down because we The new wooden house, 2005 haven’t used fertiliser, nor indeed have we taken say smugly.So, without quite meaning to, we’ve any particular care of the trees- so we couldn’t drifted into employing people to help with the Harvesting the olives which go to the press ancient Russian shotgun over his shoulder guarantee to supply a given quantity of oil. work on the land. I find it suits me quite well, to produce oil is a bigger job and takes like some antique Maniot ruffian. The Generally, people in the UK have wanted more after nine years of hard-line insistence that we do us maybe a month. We take off the olive hunting season ends next week so the than we were able to supply. That’s one thing. the work ourselves. bearing boughs with a saw and feed them landscape is loud with the popping of shotguns at the moment. They shoot small over a sort of vibrator, a machine about the Giorgia, Niko’s daughter, whom I describe in the We finally solved that problem by taking our oil birds, thrushes and other songbirds, and size of an old fashioned ice cream cart, to a press in another village run by the Milionis article as a chilly presence, gradually became much while you may not approve, it is a part of which we wheel from tree to tree. Big nets brothers. Thimios and Ilias are students of the friendlier towards us. We like her very much. In life for Greek men, and at least the birds are or sheets are spread under the trees to catch game and take a keen interest in the quality of the evenings she does needlepoint pictures. We eaten after they have been shot. stray olives which fly about like shrapnel. their oil, so what we do now is to put our own have one hanging in the wooden house, which she At the end of the day you find olives in oil into the common vat and send as much as we gave us as a gift. your shoes, your pockets and even in your need to the UK directly from the factory. They I encountered Frosso and Dina the other underwear. take care of the shipping and bottling/canning. April 15 2005. A bird in the week sitting around their fire, plucking small birds. They had two bowls on the floor in hand We take the sacks of olives down to the And then something else happened. Over the front of them, one containing the scarlet years I have done various odd jobs for the plucked corpses, the other piled high with press a couple of kilometres away on the Birthday bulletin. 8.15pm. Feb 16. Sitting Abramis family on their house in the village: put un-plucked birds. Feathers everywhere, coast together with empty barrels and return at the table, writing by the light of the in some timber ceilings to cover the raw concrete, obviously. a few days later with the oil. You get about diminutive solar powered lamp, with my ten kilos of oil from a fifty kilo sack of olives. built a kind of lean-to kitchen and other bits and pieces. Each time I have done some job for them, birthday present bottle of Mythos Hellenic It’s good stuff too, everybody says so. We We don’t eat songbirds ourselves as a rule but I have refused payment and each time Niko has Lager in front of me and listening to the don’t use fertiliser, or what the Greeks call Andriana, a Greek friend, once brought a tray said, one day I’ll bring you some help with your wind outside as it roars like a train out of the farmako and its cold pressed. Each year of cooked thrushes as an addition to a Jacob’s join olives. (The subtext here is that Niko thinks I’m a mountains. we get anything between three hundred meal at our house. They are a tad crunchy since piss poor farmer, and he’s right.) and eight hundred litres, most of which we Niko popped in before it got dark with his you are supposed to eat them, bones and all. Greeks seem to refer to all small birds shot for the In the last couple of weeks since we finished The wooden house, after more than nine years, their nests. Koukouvalia is the very evocative table as thrushes, though the hunting bag may our first olive harvest, I have added some is weathering well, though Gordon and I did Greek name for owls. include species which would be considered rare decking and a balcony outside, which take off and replace the roof a couple of years in the UK, black redstart, for instance, as well as will double our living space in the warmer ago to make it more weatherproof. We have re- Though we do get some rain and the sky blackbirds, blackcap and thrushes. weather. I think Linda is pleased with the varnished the exterior timber several times and can still be overcast from time to time, the house. Certainly, she spends more time the balcony decking gets an annual coat of old perfect spring days grow more frequent Housebuilding cleaning the new cooker and washing up, olive oil mixed with diesel. Last year I included and little by little the daytime temperatures than seems quite healthy. Someone said, the contents of the chip pan into this patent rise as the sun passes higher across the It is my birthday today (59, if you really when they saw it for the first time that it was preservative. A faint odour of the takeaway hung sky. Through the winter the sun sets invisibly want to know) but it’s also almost exactly six a very romantic house, which was a nice about the place for a while after. behind the slope of the valley, but as the months since we arrived in the empty olive thing to say. days grow longer we begin to see the sun We moved into the big house maybe three years groves in the baking heat, when all we had setting across the bay. We lose the sunset ago and the wooden house is now used by friends, by way of amenities was a water tap wired For anyone interested in the economics of again at the end of September. family and couch surfers. to a tree. the project: the four acres of olive grove cost us 45,000 euros, while the materials for the We have started gardening in a halting sort The house building project has gone pretty house (including timber, roofing, plumbing June 10 2005. Spring. of way, laying water pipes and fitting taps smoothly really, though I did fall off the roof fittings, etc) probably cost a little over around the outside of the house so that we People say that if you want to see the Greek in the early stages and crack a rib, which 20,000 euros. Harvesting the 200 olive can keep the place green through the heat landscape at its best, then you must come in slowed me up for a week or two. trees was less testing and more enjoyable of the Summer, and planting flowers and the spring, and it’s true. than we anticipated. shrubs. It’s a wooden structure, standing on a Under the olive trees lie carpets of white foundation of concrete blocks, about eight The oil will sell for maybe 4,000 euros, On the terrace below the house there marguerites studded with red anemones, metres square, divided by a mezzanine (the and of course, we get free olives, olive oil are already young trees, planted by the and we can find a dozen different species house straddles two terraces) over a timber and firewood for the stove and the excellent previous owners three years ago: a lemon of wild flowers within a few yards, though frame, the walls are constructed as a sort wood burning water heater. Linda’s two part tree, orange trees, a mulberry tree and an we don’t necessarily know what they’re of sandwich with tongued and grooved time jobs teaching English in Kalamata bring almond tree, and they are all doing well. called. Linda found bee orchids near the boarding on the outside and inside and in some hundreds of euros each month, house, and a woman from the village, solid polystyrene insulation between. We though, by English standards, wages are In contrast to this spring optimism, we spent Giorgia, taught her to recognise horta, the have a bathroom with a shower (but no very low, and my pension makes up the a melancholy afternoon in the ruined village edible greens that grow wild on the land bath), a washbasin, toilet and bidet. Power rest. We discovered, having conducted a of Mikri Mantineia which lies on a high and wild asparagus. is provided by two generators. (6kw and couple of accounting weeks, during which spur about a mile from where we live. On we totted up our basic outgoings, that our August the first, 1944, a violent earthquake 1kw) The toilet waste goes into a brick lined Swifts and swallows arrived at the end of living costs are fairly modest, maybe 200 destroyed much of the village. There septic tank (which I have probably made March and a few days later, a gorgeous euros per month. were deaths, it seems, and the surviving rather small, so that I may have to shovel troupe of hoopoes. The other day we inhabitants moved down to the coast to it out in a couple of years) Water comes watched a pair of what we took to be It all seems like a long way from our life in build new houses for themselves, so that from the village tank, a kilometre and a half eagles rising in great spirals above the the UK. We are planning a visit there in now there are two villages with the same away, down a black plastic pipe that runs house. Owls call in the night from the caves June. name. The old village is now little more than alongside the track. In the summer the water at the end of the valley, where they have arrives hot. overgrown ruins, though the two churches have been repaired. because beyond 6.0, the state has an obligation to terraces during the olive harvest. pay for damage. Before the coming of the motor car-and in White lilies grow rank in abandoned Tiny Kokonas, a spry widow in her eighties, remoter parts of the country that was not so gardens and fig trees push through Kalamata’s big recent quake came in 1986, after still passes along the opposite side of the long ago, the first tarmac road to Megali crumbling masonry.One family stayed on which 60% of the buildings in the city were valley on her donkey driving her goats Mantinia from the coast, for instance, wasn’t after the earthquake, and the last member of condemned as unsafe. As I understand, only one before her. It was Kokonas’ donkey which built until the nineteen sixties-towns and that family, an old lady, died just a couple family died, under a collapsing ceiling. A few was washed away in a freak flood a while villages were connected by a network of of years ago. We climbed the outside stair months ago, twenty odd years after the event, an ago and found later in the branches of a donkey tracks. Stretches of these tracks were of her house and pushed open the door imposing monument to the event was erected in tree, still alive. often paved, with stone bridges over stream into the dim interior. The windows were the town centre. beds and beautifully engineered dry stone shuttered and the slatted light fell across Eleni also rides a donkey. Eleni has land ramps up the steeper sections. Kalderimia, a floor littered with dusty trash: broken Historically, I guess earthquakes have always above the village, a ramshackle stretch the Greeks call these narrow stone roads, been significant in Greece. At Ancient Olympia, crockery, a spilled button box, yellowed although the word itself is probably Turkish. during what must have been a very violent letters. In another room, mildewed blankets seismo sometime during the fourth century, the lay tumbled on a bed and on the wall hung There is a fine example a few kilometres colossal temple of Zeus went over. The great stone a fading wedding photograph. from our house, a long series of ramps drums of the columns are still lying where they zigzagging up a beetling declivity, We step outside again into the springtime fell. What makes this even more interesting is maybe a thousand feet vertically, to the dazzle. that the ancient site of Olympia was entirely lost half abandoned village of Altomira in the for centuries beneath gravel banks deposited by foothills of Taygetos. Niko remembers Earthquakes here are common. Sometimes there the river Alpheios and only rediscovered in the it well. When he was a boy, it was the are several minor tremors a day, and they do nineteenth century by German archaelogists.A route they took with their flocks of sheep give you pause for thought. About six years ago cataclysmic moment buried and then found there was a significant quake in and around again. and goats each year to the high summer Kalamata, 5.9 on the Richter scale, which lasted pastures, returning only in the autumn. for many seconds. Linda was teaching a class July 2008. Donkeys. of kids at the time and when the first kid hissed The family, he says, had a house in Seismo!, they all shot under their desks, which is Donkeys appear often on Greek picture Altomira, which they used in the Summer months, but as the years passed and the the drill. postcards and tourist bumf, and there are My drawing of Niko and his donkey still a few actual donkeys to be seen in seasonal movement of livestock declined School kids in Greece do earthquake drill rural districts. Our neighbour Niko usually of stony hillside, dotted with goat sheds, (transhumance, is it called?) the family house annually, rather like English kids do fire comes down for his routine cup of coffee on chicken coops, rusting oil drums and fell into ruin and is now no more than a pile drill. After the event, the whole school trooped his donkey, particularly now that his chest abandoned tractor parts. A spinster of of stones. outside to wait for the inevitable aftershock. is getting worse and he finds it harder to uncertain age with big calloused hands Linda said the atmosphere was very emotional, walk back up the long hill to the village. The and a loud cackle, she rides side saddle up Last autumn, Linda and I climbed the stone and noisy with the sound of mobile phones as donkey stands above the house munching and back along the road from her house, in road to Altomira. It is much overgrown now anxious parents tried to get in touch. No one her black headscarf and voluminous skirts. and the fine ramps have collapsed in places was hurt and there was no structural damage, whatever it can find and farting loudly, Sometimes you see her leading the poor although it is still used. At one point we though the school was closed the following day while Niko drinks his coffee. Until a very creature loaded with a mountainous pile of were obliged to hop on to the rocks above while engineers inspected the place. They do say, few years ago, he and his family used forage. the path as a mixed flock of sheep and cynically, that earthquakes never exceed 5.9 donkeys to bring out the full sacks from the goats passed down from the heights above, Anyway, Kosta has lived in Kalamata for Megali Mantinia gorge divides, at a surprisingly large church maybe two or three hundred animals. years working for the law courts as a repo standing at the edge of the gravel beds of Behind them came a young shepherdess, man, a bailiff, we might say, reclaiming The village of Megali Mantinia stands the canyon floor. the music from the earpiece of her walkman cars, houses, etc, whose credit payments on the rim of the Rintomo gorge, a vast clearly audible. have fallen into arrears. He’s a good canyon cutting into the heart of the Taygetos Our Lady of the Burning Stooks, something man and I imagine he does his work Mountains. During the hot days of summer like that, and then on again. It’s getting dark Electric drill as humanely as possible, but again, it’s the balconies of the houses which hang as we trudge into the abandoned hamlet somehow symbolic: a Greek village boy above the gulf, catch the cooling airs. of Rintomo, no more than a scatter of ruins. As I was walking through the village the making his living among the debris of We build a fire of driftwood and make tea other day, Niko called me over to the junk consumerism. About a month ago, Linda and I took a on the Trangia stove. We sleep, not entirely filled shaded space across from his house, couple of days off to walk up the floor of the comfortably on the floor of an abandoned where he hangs out with his cronies. They Here, on the edge of the gilded dream gorge into the mountains. We leave the car shed.If you think of Greece, think of were discussing electric drills. Niko is world of the European Union, it’s hard to in Vorio, a tiny place a few kilometres further mountains. thinking of buying a drill to which he can know what to think. The old life is being up the flank of the canyon, and drop down attach an agitator, so that Frosso, his ailing replaced by something else, something the steep track into the bottom, turning up The Flood wife, can stir the big milk pan more easily which blots out the connection with the past. toward the distant peaks. We pick our way when she is making cheese. The family Past poverty was a bad thing, clearly, but up the dry river bed between white boulders After the first September rains, new shoots make a lot of cheese from their sheep, for prosperity has a double edge. and drifts of gravel, climbing a bad step begin to push up: wild crocus, cyclamen, themselves and to sell. here and there with the aid of old Via iris. New grass hazes the terraces and Niko The gilded dream world of the European Ferrata style iron rungs: a prodigious place. the shepherd lets out his sheep from the What she needs, he says is a drill that will Union… High up, we spot the ruins of the old water concrete pen where they have lived on hay go slow as well as fast. They tried a high powered corn mills which used to operate for the summer, to graze. speed drill and there was milk everywhere. I wrote this only a few years ago when times here, though there is no water now.We see When I appear a couple of days later were good and confidence was high. No one what we take to be a viper, a patterned We get thunderstorms too, in the autumn. with a cheap, variable speed drill from predicted the travails that were to come so bootlace of a thing that slides lazily away A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of quickly for Greeks. They say unemployment here the supermarket in Kalamata, Frosso is across the white rock at our approach, and the night, we had a serious storm, several is currently running at around 27%, and maybe not impressed. A wooden stick from the a dead wild boar, malodorous, half gone, hours of torrential rain, the sky flickering one in four of the shops in Kalamata is empty. mountains is better for this work, she says. though its razor tushes are still intact: a daylight bright, stupendous thunder and the formidable creature in life, I guess. rain absolutely roaring on the roof of the One thing that you do notice, though, in these Oddly emblematic of the changing times, wooden house. hard times is the sense that people are reclaiming this episode. The old ways are evolving, their vegetable gardens. Around the village The walls of the chasm grow closer and being subverted by the culture of the In the morning when we crept out, it we see patches of vegetables in previously steeper until we are passing through a commodity. Take Kosta, for example, their uncultivated plots. Giorgo at the kafineion has narrow vertical defile, chill and dank. We became clear that this had been something grown up son, a nice man of about thirty begun breeding rabbits and roosters for the table, walk beneath the tiny double arched bridge out of the ordinary. The track which passes with a slight congenital jaw defect. (This which he sells around the village. which carries the path to Pigadia village, below the house was blocked in both is klironomia again, heredity, the legacy hanging high above us. We continue on directions by landslips from the terraces of generations of intermarriage between for three or four hours toward the heart above. In one place an olive tree had come cousins, when the village was more isolated of the range, stopping briefly where the down with the mud and was standing in the from the world at large). road. Herbert our Austrian neighbour appeared, into the void behind this wall, thus creating a He and his wife live up here through the bad teeth, shrill voice and cheerful, clambering over the heaps of muddy platform. The wall had been partly built but no summer in their tiny foursquare cement unthinking generosity, is the very type of earth, clutching his digital camera. He had backfilling had been done. What we had was a shack. There are chickens a in a pen made the Greek village matron. When we have walked down to the coast a little earlier dam. During the night of the storm, the space of old pallets, and a fournos stands a few finished loading the trucks, she calls us and he showed us photographs of the flood behind the wall filled up with, it must have been yards off, by the wire gate. over to share a plate of baked potatoes, damage: cars and trees in the sea, cars hundreds of tons of, rainwater. At some point the aubergines and salty cheese, which we overturned in olive groves, a parked cabin wall failed and a deluge of mud and debris burst The fournos, the dome shaped outside oven, wash down with water and a little vinegary cruiser turned over and smashed, mud and down the slope in front of the building. We found is a powerful emblem in Greece, a symbol wine. As we leave she passes us big chunks debris everywhere. a concrete block a hundred metres away. Had I of all things domestic, traditional, secure. of paximadi, enough to live on for a week. known, I could have knocked a hole in the wall The storm made the main Greek TV news and allowed the water to escape at a sensible rate. It’s a straightforward construction of stone or in the evening, with video footage of mud cement, its internal diameter usually a little Niko’s House. filled houses and sound bites from farmers It put the building work back some weeks. over a metre. What happens is that a fire The living room of Niko Abramis’ house in who had lost livestock, carried away by the is burned inside the dome, usually of thin the village, or more properly, the only room, deluge. 2 November 2008. Katsiki olive prunings, until the whole mass of the save for a tiny kitchen and a sort of lean-to Giorgo. oven is hot, when the ashes are scraped at the back, is a long narrow affair. It used The next day Niko appeared with more away and the bread, meat or whatever is to be two rooms, I realise as I am putting up gossip: the road to the village had gone placed inside, using something resembling a Up in the Taygetos foothills, near the empty a new wooden ceiling to hide the underside entirely, revealing the ancient paved donkey baker’s paddle. The small door is closed off, monastery of Agios Giorgos, where a of the ancient concrete roof, though you track beneath. Widow Kokonas’ donkey usually with a piece of tin. The residual heat stream bed passes under the road and can still feel a difference between the two had been swept away, a fate shared by in the fournos allows you to cook for several ancient walnut trees grow, lives Giorgos, his halves. turkeys, sheep and goats around the village. hours. wife Maria and their three hundred goats. The space nearest to the street door clearly Six days after the storm, Niko found old When we arrive, Maria is just taking out Herbert and I drive up the hairpins in our used to be the best room, the room you Kokonas’ donkey in the top of a tree, where a batch of big flat loaves, and the aroma respective trucks from the coast to collect see if you look in at the open door, and the flood waters had deposited it, still alive. of newly baked bread comes to us across goat shit, siegenscheisse in German, fuski boasts dowry chests, a heavy polished the hillside. Later, we see her loading up in Greek. The manure from goats is widely table and a rag rug. Black and white family Niko felled the tree with his chainsaw and the cooling oven with chunks of stale bread regarded in Greece as the fertiliser of photographs in pitted chrome frames stand the hapless animal tottered off, unharmed from a previous batch. This will become choice. on crotchet mats. Old Frosso, Niko’s dumpy but very thirsty. paximadi, twice baked bread. It’s as hard wife, often sits on a chair just inside the as rock when it comes out, but it keeps At this time of year, Giorgo’s ramshackle open door, looking out across the narrow A detail I didn’t mention in this piece, is the forever, and you eat it by dipping it into goat pens which straggle up the stony street. Above her head on the outside wall damage the flood water had done to the big house, water or some more interesting slop to soften hillside are deep in hard, trodden manure, hangs an old tin Karelia cigarettes sign. which at that time was at an early stage. Our it. Our neighbour Niko, who is seventy, and it takes us a couple of hours to load Years ago, the family house was also a land is not flat, it’s very steep, and so, in order to remembers eating paximadi with cold both trucks, under the sinister gaze of kafineon. build a structure of any size we had to make a water for his midday meal when he was a crowds of goats. Giorgo is always keen to level space. shepherd boy in these foothills. get the fuski away before the autumn rains As you pass further into the house, you come turn it to slurry. to the space that used to be the living room, We built a retaining wall from concrete blocks Maria herself, with her black headscarf, and the plan was to pull down earth from above and the atmosphere is different. Here stands gorge drops away a thousand feet, while The interesting thing though, for non- filed past, some hundreds of people. the television atop the tall deep freeze with further off the blue bay of Messinia hangs orthodox Christians is that, once buried, its orthodox Christian fridge magnets. In like a veil. To the left rise the summits of you only stay in the ground for a couple of In a graveyard in Finikounda, we once the winter, long branches burn in the big Taygetos. A number of village houses stand years. The body is then disinterred and the encountered a group of women gathered fireplace, the unburnt ends sticking out into along this crest, to catch the cooler air, principle bones either go to the family or are around the grave of a lately buried member the room. As the burning end is consumed, Niko says. lodged in an ossuary in the graveyard. In of the family, and they were giving out the branch is pushed further in. Saves on our village this is a little shed-like place with little plastic cups of sweeties, not sweeties cutting logs. Though by more affluent standards, the a tin roof, lined with dusty shelves stacked exactly, but what seemed like sugared Abramis house might be considered very with ageing bags and boxes, all with corn kernels. A traditional thing, they said, There are beds around the walls; Niko’s basic, almost primitive, it is of central labels. The general idea seems to be that food for the dead on their journey, and for bed, he being paterfamilias, is placed most significance for the family. For village in order to be resurrected on the last day, anyone else who happens to be passing. conveniently for watching the TV. There is Greeks, the house, the spiti is primary, you are going to need your long bones and We wandered off, chewing. a long plain table, a wooden bench and and even if they move away, to the city or your skull. Hmmm. a few rush bottomed chairs; nothing like abroad, the family house has an abiding Ismini’s memories. 21 a sofa or an armchair, no carpet on the place in their hearts. The state of the disinterred body is of cement floor. considerable interest to the community. September 2009. Funerals. Clean bones used to be thought of as a Last year, Dinah, Niko’s unmarried good omen, a sign of a life well lived, Last week we spent an evening at Ismini’s daughter, asked me to put up a shelf on the house. Ismini is 66, a Greek colleague Funerals in Greece are very different from whereas a body not fully decomposed was wall above the table, on which now stands of Linda’s at her school and a native of funerals in England. When someone dies considered to be mark of previously hidden an assortment of little icons, lamps and other Kalamata. She has been reorganising her here, little black edged flyers go up on sins. In these cases the body goes back religious trinkets. Dinah goes to church twice house, moving furniture, going through old walls and telegraph poles, giving the name into the ground for another spell. The issue on Sundays, but then why not? It’s only fifty papers and books, and is in a mood to of the person who has died and the time can be complicated when the dead person yards away down the narrow street. reminisce. and place of the funeral. In our village it’s has been taking long term pharmaceuticals, always the same little cemetery. I guess which apparently have a preservative effect. I hear that there are more than twenty She shows us an old identity card of her these little notices must go up very quickly churches within the village boundary, most aunt’s issued in 1943 by the occupying since burial usually follows within a day or In Mani, there used to be a tradition of of them very small. Dinah’s shelf is a sort of two of death. funeral laments, mirologia, sung by women shrine, I suppose. She lights the little lamps at the graveside, passionate improvised on name days, at Easter and other church Everyone gets buried. You need a dirges accompanied by breast beating and festivals. special permit to be cremated, and, as the tearing of hair. I understand, the only crematorium is in In the summer when the weather is hot, the Athens. The whole village turns out for the I was in a small town near Delphi some family spend most of the time outside, in funeral and a big procession makes its way years ago, where a group of local boys the vine shaded yard that beetles over the from the dead person’s house, following had been killed in a car smash. A number Rintomo gorge. It’s a most uplifting thing the coffin which is usually carried to the of families had suffered a loss and the heart when you first pass through the gloomy graveyard by family members and friends. rending sound of wailing was everywhere. house and come out into the back yard. I’ve never seen a hearse here, though I Later, members of the bereaved families sat The view is stupendous: below your feet the imagine such things must exist in the towns. on chairs in the square while the entire town The monument at Meligalas Nazis. (Greece was occupied by the be called To Asteraki, the little star. rural Greece, though ostensibly under Nazi Maniot Feuds. Germans from 1941 until 1944) Ismini domination, came to be administered by a remembers the civil war which followed the When she was a girl, all the young people communist resistance movement, EAM (the occupation. Her father was a communist wanted to get away from Kalamata. It’s a National Liberation Front)and its military Mani, where we live, is that middle finger and, following the civil war, the communist bigger, better place now. There are clubs, wing (ELAS) of Greece pointing south toward Africa, party was declared illegal in Greece. bars, facilities for young people. These a strange country of rocky headlands and Known communist sympathisers were barred days’ people want to stay, bring up their At the same time, the quisling prime deserted tower houses. from jobs in the public services and many children here. minister, Rallis, recruited Greeks to form were imprisoned or shot. It seems that collaborationist ‘security battalions’ whose In the past, the Maniots had a reputation Ismini’s father was condemned to death and Ismini was brought up near the centre of the remit was to root out communists and as brigands and bandits, and the whole only escaped the firing squad because of old city, but the house she has lived in for communist sympathisers. peninsula used to be known as Kakovouna, the chance intervention of a neighbour. the past thirty years is at the eastern edge, the bad mountains, or the land of evil where it merges with the ancient coastal Following the German withdrawal from counsel. The chief occupation of the maniot As young girls, she and her sister Eleni town of Pharai. Homer mentions Pharai in Greece in the summer of 1944 came the families seems to have been feud, and these were required to sign oaths renouncing the Odyssey. Odysseus’ son Telemachus inevitable clash between these opposing feuds were not merely quarrels, but shooting communism but were nonetheless forbidden comes here in search of his lost father. elements. ELAS succeeded in disbanding wars, vendettas, which could persist through from attending Greek universities. As a some of the security battalions, but during generations. result, Ismini went to study in England, June 1st 2009. Meligalas. early September, in southern Peloponnesos, where she became a fluent English speaker the local battalions and their sympathisers It seems that only boys and men fought. began to gather in the town of Meligalas Male children were referred to as ‘guns’. and a lifelong anglophile. Twenty kilometres north of Kalamata lies the and to prepare to defend it against an It was generally safe for women to move town of Meligalas, a dusty rural settlement expected ELAS attack. about during hostilities. As late as 1870, A rough town, Kalamata, she says, in the like a hundred others in Greece. The name in the village of Kitta, a detachment of years when she was growing up, a sea port Meligalas translates roughly as milk and The assault came on September 14 and regular troops was called in to put down a with a string of dives and brothels along honey, but in truth it’s a melancholy place. A lasted three days, but finally the town was particularly protracted affair. the waterfront. The town had a reputation mile outside the town stands a big concrete overrun, though losses were heavy among as a haven for homosexuals in those years. cross erected in the early 1970s, when the attackers. Anyone not routinely resident But old habits die hard. I was speaking Interestingly, the Greek word sika, meaning Greece was being run by a military junta. in the town was rounded up and over the to an elderly woman in a village not far fig, also denotes an inhabitant of Kalamata next few days, executed. Estimates of the from where we live. Her family had been -whose chief export used to be figs. It’s also Across the road from the monument, tall numbers killed vary, maybe as many as involved in a feud with a rival family for a popular term for a gay. slabs are inscribed with the names of fifteen hundred. The big concrete cross generations, and though the killings had hundreds of Greeks who died at the hands stands over what used to be a dry well, into ceased in recent years, she still sent her sons There is still prostitution in some parts of of fellow Greeks in mid September 1944, which many of the bodies were thrown. to live in America to ensure their safety. the city, but it’s a licensed business these only weeks after the withdrawal of German There are old people in Meligalas today The population of Mani is much smaller days, she says. Until a year ago there occupying forces.It’s a tragic, complex story, who remember these events, and those that than it was, many of its original inhabitants was a bordello a hundred metres down but the bones of it are as follows… the street from Ismini’s house, To Asteri, the followed as the country slid into civil war. having emigrated, to Australia and elsewhere. Weekenders from Athens star, but it closed its doors and the building During the German occupation (1941-44), Bitter memories and resentments are still renovate the old tower houses, and in the now houses a kindergarten. Her son Stathi when members of the legitimate Athens handed down. summertime German camper vans cruise the suggested that the new kindergarten should government had fled to Egypt, much of narrow road that loops around the coast. and are inedible to most predators, but not it. It lies in the old town, up a steep street of finances, is no music lover, preferring to the Hoopoe. stone steps, below the castle, behind the big devote money to more visible improvements, An Athenian friend of ours told us that, church of Ipapandi (one of several names fountains, tree planting and so on. Neither years back, one group of Maniot families’ Hoopoes can often be seen lying on the for the Virgin) Big palm trees grow in its Stathi nor the staff were paid wages for intent upon emigrating only made it to the open ground with their wings outspread. shady courtyard and from the high ceilinged several months following his election. It port of Piraeus. These families now run the We have driven past them on the track rooms within, you can often hear piano wasn’t until staff, students and supporters dives and brothels along the waterfront. On several times in this supine posture and scales, the sound of a soprano voice or the mounted a sort of musical demonstration in occasion they shoot one another, in the time they seemed quite unconcerned. There are creak of a beginner’s violin. I had assumed the town square that wages began to be honoured fashion. assorted theories to explain this behaviour: that the building had always housed the paid again. sunbathing, I read in one book. music school, but it seems not. A church at Oct 2009. Hoopoes one time and then a school, it became the And now the Odeio is under threat of closure. The Odeio in 1986, after the earthquake: one Greek government in Athens is under pressure The other day, one of the two cats that of several cultural initiatives, including the from its creditors to cut the number of public live under the wooden house came trotting (now very successful) annual dance festival, employees. Small provincial institutions make an along the terrace with a Hoopoe in its and a visual arts centre. easy target. mouth. Stathis Giftakis is the Principal, a highly As it happens, we now know Stathi and his wife Now, if you’ve never seen a Hoopoe, and regarded composer in Greece, with a Lilly very well, having worked together on a they are hardly ever seen in England, it’s a well developed sense of irreverence and number of occasions. pigeon sized bird with a curving bill, a long a taste for off colour jokes. Linda teaches crest on its head, which it often erects on Hoopoe English to his son Arionas, himself, at 14, April 2009. Thanasis dies. landing, and bold black and white stripes a precocious violinist and guitarist. Stathi’s on its wings and tail; a bird such as a small Even the Latin name for the species is deputy is the bear-like Ivan, a Russian voice Thanasis died a few weeks ago at eighty- child might draw, or Edward Lear. peculiar: Upupa Epops, which probably teacher, who also conducts one of the odd. His dapper little figure was a familiar derives from the sound of its call, a carrying town’s choirs (in which Linda sings). sight around the village. He was deaf as a Everything about the Hoopoe is odd. oop-oop-oop. It’s the sound of spring here, post and amost always alone, an isolate. The broody females and nestlings have like the call of the first cuckoo in England. The Youth Orchestra, which rehearses every the ability to produce a foul smelling week at the Odeio, is currently on tour in During the dark years of the German/Italian liquid reminiscent of rotting meat, to deter So I called the cat over and managed to Germany. occupation (1941-44) and afterwards, it predators, somewhat after the fashion of the persuade it to part with the bird. It flew off seems that Thanasis, who can only have skunk. From the age of six days the nestlings frantically, apparently unharmed, leaving a We go sometimes to the Sunday evening been a very young man at the time, was are also able to direct a stream of liquid shit single black and white feather behind. ‘Music Café’ where professional musicians an informer. The houses of suspected at intruders. They can also hiss like snakes. from Athens and abroad perform as guests, communists he had denounced, were You couldn’t make it up, could you? The Odeio while Stathi, with his goatee beard and burned. Our neighbour Niko says there owl spectacles, acts as the droll master of were deaths, shootings. One of its sources of food is the One of my favourite buildings in Kalamata is ceremonies. processionary caterpillar, which troops the elegant colonaded pile which currently Whatever may have actually occurred, through the trees in long files. These houses the Odeio the ‘musical conservatory’, It’s a great place, but life is rarely simple. Thanasis’ ostracism by his fellow villagers caterpillars are covered in irritating hairs as the new tourist guide rather grandly puts The new mayor, who controls the city’s was a palpable fact. We have seen him, not merely ignored, but pushed aside by his off at their house in the village. We knock in a big toy store in Kalamata (Jumbo) on The turkey was in the oven and everything fellow villagers, and this fifty years later. and go in. Frosso is laid in an open coffin Christmas Eve and it felt pretty much like the was under control, when Herbert phoned surrounded by flowers, and the house is full, commodity fest we remember from the UK. to say that he and Mikhail had gone down What puzzled us was why he stayed, solid with people from the village sitting in with the flu. A few minutes later, Holger and why he never left the village to lead a life silence. We usually make our Christmas phone Margaret phoned to say the same. elsewhere, free from his past. calls to family and friends from the public Niko, Dina and the other members of the phone box in the village, using phone One o clock saw Linda and I, touts seuls, The years of the occupation and the civil family are sitting at the far end of the room cards. It’s cheaper than using the mobile, looking at one another over a giant roast war which followed, are only remembered with a priest and we edge through to offer and you know when people have had their turkey. Now the cruel part about all this by the elderly. It seems that the then Prime our sympathy and then sit for a few minutes four minutes’ worth because the line goes is that Linda was due to fly to England Minister, Rallis, set up what were called with the other mourners. An old lady comes dead. Everyone under thirty in the UK that on Boxing Day to spend a week with her security battalions, collaborationist militia in from the street. She stands by Frosso’ we spoke to seemed to have received a flat parents, so I had a week of turkey soup/ groups, recruited from local communities, coffin speaking agitatedly to her and screen TV from Santa. curry/rissoles/kebabs/pie/fricassee to look whose remit was to purge their communities stroking her face and hair. forward to. of known communist sympathisers, which in The walk up to the village to use the rural areas could mean anyone you had a The funeral takes place at noon, only twenty phone proved highly sociable. Today we Jan 2009. Egoismos. grudge against. Many people at the time four hours after her death, but it seems encountered Dina and Giorgia, Niko’s thought that the threat of communism was a to be the way it’s done here, sensible I grown up daughters, on their way to feed To an English person, brought up with some greater evil than the fascist occupation. guess, particularly in the hot summertime. the sheep: Dimitri, a nice bloke who looks a notion of decent reserve, a concern not to The whole village follows the coffin to the lot like Bing Crosby, on his way to feed his blow one’s own trumpet, Greece can seem It wasn’t until 1949 that anything like civil cemetery. Three priests in their tall hats goats: Walter, an ex-foreign legion Austrian, like a nation of experts and heroes, the peace was restored. Old hatreds still lie not intone the necessary prayers for what seems emerging blearily from his tiny house after men, that is. Modest, unassuming Greek far below the surface. like a long time. his post lunch nap: and a retired English men are rare creatures. couple out walking their dog. They rent a In the days that follow, we pop in from house in the village whilst their new house March 2009. Frosso dies. There is a word in Greek, egoismos, which time to time and the house is always full is being built, or, as it seems, not being obviously has links with English words like of neighbours and friends, the fire always built. The malign effects of the worsening One evening, a couple of weeks ago, egotism/egoism, but egoismos resonates burning in the big chimney. Niko has Euro/sterling exchange rate, combined as I am driving into Kalamata to do my differently. It covers conceit, selfishness and stopped shaving and won’t shave again for with reduced interest rates on what they weekly stint of private teaching, I take a so on but would probably be best translated another year or more. It’s hard for him. They have invested, means that, at the moment call on my mobile phone from Dina, our as something like self assertion. Far from were married for fifty years. anyway, they can’t afford to continue. neighbour Niko’s unmarried daughter. The being a source of shame, egoismos seems signal is bad so I stop the car and stand on to be a part of male identity. A Greek man We had invited our neighbours Herbert and the windswept road by the sea with spray January 2009. Christmas. will almost always have an opinion in a Mikhail and two other Austrian friends to the erupting a few yards off. Dina tells me, in given situation, even though he hasn’t a wooden house for Christmas lunch, and had Greek, that her mother died at lunchtime. I guess Christmases abroad are always clue, and in any group of men, opinions bought turkey, the ingredients for stuffing, My Greek is limited and I am not sure I going to be weird. For a start, in Greece are always expressed simultaneously. If sprouts, etc, in order to give them an English have understood properly. they place a good deal less emphasis on you watch news programmes on Greek TV, Christmas dinner. The following morning Linda and I stop Christmas than they do on Easter, or even what you often see is a split screen with, New Year, though we happened to be say, four politicians shouting at each other whose lives have been affected by events in in Leeds as a civil engineer, supervising Both places attract large numbers of English at the same time. the wider world, by history. the construction of motorway bridges and holidaymakers in the summer, mostly underpasses around the city. families, and the whole coast thereabouts As I say, for an English person of my At a birthday party in the hills above boasts hundreds of holiday houses and generation (almost 63) it can all seem Kardamili recently, I fell into conversation A few weeks ago, at the end of our annual apartments. a bit abrasive and not necessarily very with a grey haired Israeli woman, Ala. trip to England, we took a taxi in the early productive, although Greek friends say that We talked about Cyprus and she told me hours of the morning to catch a plane. The Inner Mani is a different place. The land they can speak and listen simultaneously, about Palestine, where she had lived for Asian cab driver tells us he was born in of evil counsel, Kakovouvia, the bad and it’s probably true. many years in a house built by a millenarian Uganda. When he was a child, his whole mountains. An empty place, most of the group from Germany in the last century who family had been expelled from the country, Maniots having emigrated over the years, Our neighbour Niko, when he comes had come to Palestine to await the day of along with thousands of other Asians, by Idi many of them to Australia, though I did hear down to the house for coffee or to have his judgement. Ala’s parents were Polish Jews Amin. of one man who fetched up in Cardiff years hair cut, is always charming and friendly, who fled the Nazi invasion in 1941. They ago and stayed to raise a family there. but when we listen to him in the kafineion fled east into Russia, and Ala was born near I remember reading reports in the press, in among his village cronies, he sometimes Stalingrad just after the siege ended. On her the mid seventies, I guess. At that time many The terraced mountainsides of Inner Mani snaps and snarls at them like a terrier. birth certificate it says, under place of birth: Ugandan businesses were run by Asians. are uncultivated now and the strange It is as if these displays of egoismos are Stalingrad. She and her mother survived villages are deserted. There is a thin required among fellow villagers in order to to return for a while to Poland. Her father Those expelled made new lives for veneer of development, some tourism, a maintain his place, his ascendancy, but with didn’t. Ala feels an abiding gratitude to the themselves elsewhere in the world, some bit of heritage refurbishment of fortified foreigners it’s not necessary. Russians. in England, and now, years later, the villages, and there are churches, hundreds tyrannical Amin being long dead, the of churches, many of them very old and I have been reading a fine book recently, At another do, where Linda and the band Ugandan government is asking Asians to boasting byzantine frescoes. They are to be A Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village, were playing music, I found myself sitting return to the country to resume their activities. found everywhere, in the corners of fields, by Juliet Du Boulay. It was written about next to a middle aged bloke who was here Our driver’s family ran a quarry in the old by the roadside, lost among thorns and forty years ago by a young anthropologist on holiday with his family. Amir, an Iranian days and his brother has already returned to prickly pear, often in a poor state of repair, who spent two years in a remote mountain by birth had gone to England from Iran in restart the business. He says maybe he will though seldom abandoned. There is usually village. The book is full of perceptive the 1970s, following his compulsory year go too, when his son is through university. a lamp burning inside. Someone comes. observations about the ways in which the of military service in the Iranian army, to do community manages itself, the complex postgraduate work at Manchester University. Mani. But off the single main road that runs south network of conventions and obligations to Cape Tenaron, the southernmost point of Europe, what you become aware of is the which allow people to get along more or Shortly after his arrival in England, the Iran/ We live in Mani, that peninsular of southern emptiness of the mountains, the melancholy less amicably. Egoismos looms large in the Iraq war broke out, a war that was to last Greece which thrusts down into the of absence. It’s a three hour drive to book, and maybe, in less obvious ways, we twenty years, a war in which he said two Mediterranean Sea towards Africa. Tenaron from where we live. can detect it in ourselves. million people died. Had he returned to Traditionally, Mani is divided into two parts: Iran, he would have been sent immediately Outer Mani in the North and inner Mani, We motor up the tiny vertiginous roads to the front. Wisely, he stayed away, and the bony tip of the peninsula. Sept 2008. People. to abandoned villages and poke about married Liz, an Irish born Liverpudlian, and among the beetling ruins. We camp out We seem to meet a lot of people here they had two kids. For many years now, The little coastal resorts of Kardamili and sometimes, as we did last week, by the in Greece whose stories make you gulp, Amir has worked for the local authority Stoupa are to be found in Outer Mani. sea at Tenaron, sleeping on the rock cut to Athens and then taken the bus. As we Hmmmm, I think, all the rings on the gas days we see him occasionally as he mooches shelf that was once the foundation of a bumped down the last few hundred yards cooker are turned off, and there must be a through our land to pick herbs and to give us building, two thousand years ago, but now of the track, leaving a long cloud of dust leak in the pipe, a mouse job. The same the benefit of his latest thinking. Work on his long gone. A whole city once stood here, behind us, we became aware of the sound thing happened last year: mice chewed house has more or less stopped, though his friends where now there is nothing except a little of a pneumatic drill. This was Sunday and through the gas pipe while we were away. appear from time to time to do bits and pieces. He ruined church overlooking the sea, built the valley should have been soundless, After a fatal moment’s thought, I close the lives at home with his parents. The last few years partly from colossal blocks of much older except for the ciccadas, but a young Greek tap and go back inside. Plaf! A blue carpet have been difficult for him, and his young man’s masonry. Pausanias, who travelled around bloke, Andreas, who runs a fast food of flame explodes across the floor as the egotism has been dented. He is, of course, older Greece in the second century AD, records place in Kalamata called, quaintly, Adam’s gas/air mixture in the room ignites from the than he was. that a temple of Poseidon the sea god once Chicken, is building a pied-a-terre across the fridge pilot light. A smoke blackened mouse stood here. Inside the roofless place a little valley. This was him shattering the Sabbath totters from beneath the cooker. Oh yes….I couldn’t absolutely swear that I saw altar stone is piled with votive offerings left silence on his day off. A poor start. a smoke blackened mouse. I rehearsed the story, including the mouse, often enough to make me by visitors: coins, finger rings, earrings, Though it looked and felt quite alarming, a bit vague on the point. Journalistic licence, I little posies of dead flowers, coloured hair As we unloaded our luggage from there was no damage at all, nothing caught guess. bands, even a zip toggle. Herbert’s car outside the house, it became fire. I located and repaired the chewed hole immediately clear that our garden, such as in the pipe so that we were able to put the Dina, Niko’s daughter, had been watering the We went to some quarries too, last week, at it is, had been comprehensively devoured kettle on and make a cup of tea. plants while we were away, by the way. a remote location high in the mountains, at (by three escaped sheep, we learned later) Half an hour later, Linda’s mobile goes. the top of an improbably steep road, where Pretty much everything had been eaten Zanetos years ago they cut the red stone which was down to the roots, including Linda’s pet An English woman in the village has been stung by a wasp and her arm is swelling up used to embellish the houses and palaces of peach tree, which she had grown from a We live outside the village and our social dangerously. Linda flies off in our truck to the rich. They found fragments of stone from stone, and all the carrots, courgettes and relations are patchy. Take yesterday. In find an open Farmakio in Kalamata and the these quarries when they were excavating tomatoes in the vegetable garden. The only the evening we walk down the track with relevant antidote. the palace at Mycenae which was built thing which remained uneaten was the a bottle of wine to Herbert’s house. Six o over three thousand years ago. vleeta. Vleeta is a Mediterranean green clock and Venus is bright white over the Some days are like that. vegetable which resembles a sort of tough bay. Nearby in the sky, another planet, Homecoming. spinach. We don’t like it much. Jupiter maybe. The fire is burning in the Andreas, who was building the house across the grate of Herbert’s tiny living room and he So Herbert disappears down the track and valley, we now know better. At the time I wrote Now, homecoming, returning to your own graciously finds us an English language we open up the house. In the porch outside the article, his fast food franchise seemed to be place after an absence is supposed to be news channel on his TV. He usually watches the door we have two gas bottles, one of doing well and he was able to pay assorted teams a rewarding experience. The first twenty Austrian stuff, naturally. which runs a little gas fridge in the house, of Albanians to build the house, a traditional minutes following our return the other day and the other the gas cooker. I had turned stone structure on a very steep site. The business to the wooden house, after spending a few Herbert has had someone staying with him off the bottles before departing for England. folded soon after, as the shadow of the recession weeks in the UK, was beset by an unlikely lengthened, and work on the house stopped. At these last months, Mikhail, an unassuming, Opening the tap on the bottle for the fridge, series of incidents. some point he went to New York to work as a frail looking man, a drug addict/alcoholic I went inside, lit the little pilot light at the builders’ labourer but was back in Greece within back in Austria, finding his way to a better back, and went outside again to open the Herbert, our Austrian neighbour, had months. life here in Greece. He works around collected us from Kalamata bus station in other bottle. I turn on the tap. There is a hiss. Herbert’s place, gardening, helping with the his ancient Mercedes- we had flown in Conditions there were very bad, he said. These animals, odd jobs, and the old man feeds (Kokonas also has three sons) took their him and gives him a bed. Mikhail seems shotguns and went to make a proposition to very content and it suits Herbert too, I guess, the cad in question. Marry our sister or we having someone around to speak German kill you. with.We sit with a glass of wine and listen to the gossip. He tells us in his fractured but Sensible fellow, he agreed to do the right effective English that yesterday a man with thing, and now, twenty years later, there a dog appeared on his land, Hervig, with are grown up children and husband and whom he has had a nodding acquaintance wife get on well, as far as you can tell. for years. The husband of the third sister, Zanetos, . is universally regarded as a Mafioso and Now Hervig is a German though he has a bad character.He is from the island of lived for many years in Greece and is long Samos, where they are all villains, so it’s married to a Greek woman, the eldest of only to be expected. three sisters, daughters of Kokonas, the old woman whose donkey, you may remember, Well, anyway, Zanetos is in deep trouble was washed away by a flood and later with the law, having sworn an affidavit at found alive in a tree. Kokonas is ninety this the notary’s office that he owns a piece of year, and still riding the same donkey. land which is not, in fact, his.

So the two men spend a long German The real owner turns out to be an Athenian afternoon together over cans of lager, and lawyer. Bad move, Zaneto. Herbert discovers much….

Herbert’s friendship with Mikhail lasted a The new news, from last week, is that few months. The young man would disappear two brothers from the village, Sotiris and for days, drinking in the bars along the coast. Giorgos, have been injured whilst felling a Finally, it was too much for Herbert. They tree: a fractured skull in the one case and quarrelled and Mikhail moved on. broken shoulder in the other. Sotiris is in hospital in Athens and the outlook is not I met him twice later, the first time in good. We know the brothers only slightly, Kardamyli, where he seemed to be living rough pleasant, open faced blokes, who help to on the beach. He blagued twenty euros from run one of the village tavernas. me, and I didn’t expect to see the money again, The old news, the folklore of the family but months later I encountered him again in Hervig married into years ago, is various. Kardamyli, running across the beach to give me Herbert discovers, for example, that back the twenty euros. A nice man. the second of Kokonas’ daughters was compromised as a young woman, by a Kokonas died, fell out of a window, aged ninety local swain, and so her three brothers eight. Peter Huby worked as a teacher in the north of England for 26 years. He also directed festivals and community theatre. He has made a number of independent films and published 3 novels. He and his wife Linda who was Head of Performing Arts at Settle College in North Yorkshire have lived in Greece for the past 11 years. She and Peter worked together building first a modest wooden house and later a much bigger structure. They share the work during the annual olive harvest too. Linda now also teaches some English and sings in a Greek choir.

Adrian Joyner PHOTOGRAPHYwww.adriancjoyner.com