16–17 March 2009
Monday-Tuesday

It is hard to believe that we have been here in the southern Peloponnese for just one month. In that short time we have met so many new people, both Greeks and foreigners, ingratiated ourselves with our landlady and her family, explored three castles, four towns, and a handful of villages; taken some extraordinary hikes; gone swimming in the (still frigid) Mediterranean; enrolled the girls in the local school; gone horeseback riding (Lucia), running and biking daily (Jonathan and the big kids), and eaten a variety of unusual and delectible foods. We have become regular Sunday church-goers, European football fans, interested homebuyers—albeit in a dream state—students of modern Greek language and ancient Greek history, and afficionados of sunsets. We have been sunburned, rained on, hailed on, and nearly blown off the pier by tremendous gales.

Tonight we plan to have dinner with “the pirates”—at least that’s Evyenia’s not altogether unfitting description of Chris and Kosta. Chris is a British man who stands about 6 foot 4 inches tall, has long blonde hair, and a perennially friendly disposition. Kosta, a Greek from Athens who has lived in Fini for the past twenty years, is as close to a twenty-first-century incarnation of “Zorba the Greek” as one could find. Every Greek island, village, or town, in Jonathan’s experience, includes a male character who fancies himself a modern version of Zorba—the quintessential Greek lover, drinker, bon vivant. Kosta, however, appears to be the real thing: a man who lives life to the fullest. And then some.

Our friends Tom and Kim told us about Kosta. Several people, speaking independently of one another, have used the same hackneyed expression: “larger than life.” And Tom’s useful Olympic analogy seems the most fitting of all: “If eating and drinking and carrying on were Olympic sports, Kosta would hold all the gold medals.”

We met one another near the pier yesterday afternoon. He and Chris were drinking several beers under the veranda of a café, amused by the waterside “entertainment”: a guy was burying his truck, trailer, and inflatable boat in the soft sand while attempting to haul his craft. His obstinance was complete. “You idiot,” Kosta shouted, “you need to take the trailer off first or you’ll bury yourself.” The distant reply (“go to hell, mister!”) generated an eruption of laughter from Kosta and some quiet amusement from Chris.

“Well look here, Kosta, it’s Tom and Kim’s friend, Jonathan. We were just speaking about you!” We had been looking forward to meeting Kosta for several weeks. He just returned from Athens a few days ago. We introduced ourselves all the way around and joined the two for beverages while the kids collected treasures on the beach.

Kosta reached for his mobile phone and called our friends in New Hampshire, where it was now mid-morning. “Yeia sou, Kimmie, where is that crazy Thoma? What, he’s shoveling snow?! Tell him we’re sitting with Yianni and Anna at the café watching the morons from Athens destroy their transmissions.”

In short order Kosta made arrangements for the seven of us to go out to a taverna on Monday night (in Methoni), on Tuesday night (in Pylos), and on Wednesday night (in Finikounda); made calls to several people to see about renting us a villa for another month—“you can’t leave just as your friends Tom and Kim arrive. That would not be right. Here is what you will do…”—and then proceeded to tell us every monkey joke he knew. We were glad the children were playing on the beach. Jonathan anticipated a series of upcoming Olympic events, a kind of decathalon of drinking and eating, and he girded his metaphysical loins for what lay ahead.

Kosta inherited his father’s caique, a fifty-year-old, immaculately maintained 35-foot double-ender named “Babis.” (We suspect that the boat name is part and parcel of his summer vocabulary.) In the summer he works his craft: when he’s not at the cafeneion or the taverna, he takes people to the offshore islands or to Methoni or to Koroni (each about 10 kilometers distant, around the headland cliffs—one west of Finikounda, the other east). Kosta speaks five or six languages fluently. But the universal language is “Greek summer”—about which we were to be prematurely exposed.

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Earlier in the day Keria Irini, our landlady, prepared a tray of Greek coffees and sweets and appeared on our veranda, a vision of hospitality. The three of us sat for an hour or so, sipping our too-sweet coffee and feasting on her homemade gliko (sweets): candied grapes and currants with almonds, dripping with honey. Only a few years older than Jonathan, we nevertheless talked about the “old” Finikounda of her childhood: a small village of gravel paths, two or three tavernas, and far fewer foreigners. The Germans came first, in the early 1960s, and were soon after joined by Austrians, French, and Dutch; it seems that the English were the last to find this special place. There are very few Americans.

Today there are third and fourth generations of foreign families living in the hills above the ocean—in restored stone homes and in newly constructed villas, some small and others of epic proportions—tucked into the olive groves and vineyards, a colorful population of year-round and summer folk. Unlike other parts of the Peloponnese (such as the Mani, which is given over almost entirely to Germans) this region has not catered to any one particular group. Hence the tavernas, for examples, do not have “schnitzel” or “crepes” on the menus but are every bit as Greek in their offerings as they might have been forty years before. The analogy applies to other aspects of life—while the changes are undoubtedly substantial, and there is an obvious accommodation to the foreign community, an essential “Greekness” remains. This may be a result, more than anything, of the solidly agricultural nature of this region. And a special kind of tolerance that has vanished from many other, more populated, parts of Greece.

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Taverna Night--Ooppa!

We met the “pirates” (Chris and Kosta), as planned, at 7 p.m. at Ilias’ cafe. Chris was able to borrow a Jeep and Kosta had his own vehicle, so we divided forces and set off for a small village located outside Pylos along the main coastal road—Manny and Jonathan with Kosta, Ann and the girls with Chris. The sun had just set and a purple aura hung over the coastline, and the ridges and distant mountains were thin lines of pastel sillouette.





With Kosta in the lead, we turned off the main road and entered a warren of side streets in a small village called Mesohori. “There is no way Chris would ever find this place alone.” Kosta pulled over until the glimmer of headlights appeared behind us.

We ascended an impossibly narrow street and stopped in front of a completely restored stone house—a wonder of architecture and stone masonry skill. Two stories, with a cobble-stone patio outside, the building looked very much like the medieval Venetian structures that remain in Methoni, although completely restored to perfection. We entered the downstairs level through a granite archway that was all of five feet high. Given his height, Chris practically crawled through the narrow opening, which Nia found most amusing.

We seemed to be stepping into another era: exposed stone walls and floors, half-round floor rafters of dark olive wood, upright supports made from thick tree branches, with Ys of tree limbs supporting the rafters. A wide, curved stone staircase led to a second level.

Kosta had called ahead to ensure that our table was beside a corner fireplace, a masterpiece of fitted stone, with the taverna’s emblem, a three-chord bouzouki, made of light grey inlaid stone on the facing of the fireplace. Huge chunks of olive wood burned and crackled in the fireplace. The taverna is called Treis Chordes (“three chords”), which, like the bouzouki mosaic, is an older style of instrument, the one favored by the rembetes—the practitioners of a form of Greek “blues” that arrived in Greek with the refugees from Asia Minor in the 1920s.

We were the only patrons at an impossibly early hour for Greek tavernas—at 8 o’clock, we had arrived several hours before any other customers—and we were soon joined by the owner, who brought a kilo of wine and seven glasses, plus one for himself. The wine, which was from a newly opened barrel, was delivered with bottles of gazosa (sparkling water). As in the ancient days, it is considered ill-advised to drink wine, particulary “new” wine, without mixing it with water. This tradition, which dates to antiquity, gives us some of the magnificent kraters that one finds in the National Archaeological Museum. It was considered “uncouth” to drink wine straight—Jonathan’s first violation of the evening.

The owner sat with us, as if he were dining with us, and issued an immense catalog of offerings—this was serious business. Menus are unheard of in most traditional Greek tavernas, as the fare can change with the season or even day by day. Kosta proceeded to do the ordering. It was decided that we would share plates of food. About every ten minutes, from 8 o’clock until 1 a.m., a new dish appeared, as did another one kilo tin of wine—Jonathan counted the first eight carafes before his counting skills deteriorated into oblivion. (More on that subject later.)

From memory, here is what issued from the kitchen: several loafs of fresh crusty village bread, plus slices of bread toasted in the open fire with olive oil and oregano; several shredded cabbage and carrot salads; several shredded lettuce salads (both served with Messenia’s rightly famous olive oil and lemon); plates of tzaziki (cucumber, yogurt, garlic, and oil) and tirokefti (cheese spread with minced hot pepper); plates of mini tiropites or cheese pies (one every five minutes along with the new dishes); plates of pork cooked in tomato and wine sauce; plates of lamb, chicken, pork chops, fire-roasted with lemon and oil; four or five different types of homemade sausage; more salads (as a break before the main courses); more pies, sauces, salads, and plates of cheese; olives, currants, and fruit.

In all honesty, the author of this blog has no recollection of the main courses. He has a vague memory of the appearance of card tricks, magic tricks with coins, singing (in Italian, Greek, English, and German)…and an endless stream of wine. Several years of abstinence vanished into a veritable sea of rosé. There was enough wine to kill a small herd of swine—although the only “victim” was a Greek-American from the coast of Maine, who disappeared into the netherworld of Mesohori village sometime after midnight, only to reappear as the fruit arrived: plates of sliced apples and pears, generously treated with cognac, and drizzled with fresh honey. Another visit to back streets of the village, where he was discovered in a grove of olive trees, carefully calculating the movement of the Northern Hemisphere’s night sky. “What are you doing there? It’s time to pay the bill!” It was a young voice, which sounded very much like his son’s. “I’m noting that Orion does indeed move over time, if ever so slightly.”

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The sound of jack hammers outside our house, at 8 o’clock in the morning, was as intense a torture as one man could possibly be expected to endure—a tortuous coda to the late evening we had just enjoyed. Jonathan found the road work especially onerous and made several pointless threats from the confines of the living room couch. The girls missed school; Manny missed his date with Kosta aboard the caique “Baby,” and Ann played nurse extraordinaire. And everyone had that terrible sense of déjà vu . . . all over again.

Never again. Well…never again.

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At midday, we traveled to a nearby village, Akritohori, with the daughter of our landlady who is a realtor. She showed us a buildable lot within the village limits--with a fantastic view southwest toward Finikounda and the bay islands and the mountains to the north.

Then we traveled back down to Finikounda to look at another, larger lot--with several dozen olive trees but no view of the ocean. It was oriented away from the sea, toward the hillsides of vineyards and olive orchards.

Although we can think about trying to afford the land, building the house is another matter. It's still nice to dream the big dream...

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