First Week in Finikounda

Our Lonely Planet

The travel guide The Lonely Planet names the Peloponnese the number one destination in the world for 2016. It comes as no surprise to anyone who has spent any time here. The diversity of sights—modern and ancient—of topography, ocean frontage, villages, monasteries, Mycenaean, classic and Byzantine sites, a diversity of pastoral settings—it is truly dizzying. It would take several lifetimes to see it all.

Heading seaward from the village of Kamaria

I have the good fortune of living in two of the most beautiful places in the world—Downeast Maine and southern Messinia.

In some ways they are very much alike: unspoiled, with natural splendor, full of a wide range of flora and fauna. Niko suggests, on some authority, that the Peloponnese boasts a greater diversity of flora/fauna than anywhere on earth: there are a multitude of species--mammals, reptiles, insects, and plants.

But natural beauty aside, the Peloponnese outmatches Downeast Maine on nearly every level, including the diversity of its human residents. It is unfair and perhaps a bit unnecessary to judge one against the other, but the following questions, asked of both places, provides a clear sense of the differences:

What are the traditional foods and how are they prepared?

View toward Finikounda from our mountain village

What are the traditional dances and can most people perform them?

What about the traditional music, poetry, crafts, and folkways?

How many traditional fesivals (panayiri) occur per month?

The Peloponnese is steeped in a three-thousand-year-old culture that is dizzying in its complexity, richness, and vibrancy. And then there is the human element: People are light-hearted, generous, honest, forgiving, and full of animation, laughter, and gratitude for this special place. But, of course, like everywhere there are exceptions to the rule--if just a few.

Traditional food of Downeast Maine? Whoopie pies and dry fish dinner?—argh. (It would be enough to make a local gag. The locals might describe Maine food as “halia”--disgusting) Beverages (Budweiser? …I’ll concede: apple cider is our “traditional” beverage). But answers to the other questions yield very, very little in the way of substance. A cultural neutron bomb might have fallen on Maine in the mid-1950s, such is the cultural sterility of the place. 

Music

Music is everywhere in the southern Peloponnese but the instrument with the greatest distinction is the clarinet. One commentator on last night’s radio show, coming from Kalamata, suggested in the most florid terms: “The clarinet is an appendage of the human soul. Is is the voice of God speaking to humankind.” My friend and musical comrade Lee will understand this more than most.

Other instruments include the quintessential bouzouki, but also the baglama (a small cousin to the bouzouki), and a variety of percussive instruments—including the horns of animals, the nails of goats (a kind of rattle), the accordion, and others.

The Battle of the Bugs

I woke at 3 a.m. and noticed a very large sarandapodousa, a gruesome forty-legged slitherer with fierce pinchers. I dispatched it with a hard sandal; but even broken into pieces it continued to writhe with a menacing wriggle. To use the American idiom: it grossed me out. The thought of this creature crawling up my naked torso at 3 a.m. was sufficient motivation to visit the plant store in Finikounda at 8 a.m.

Mr. Organic Gardener was prepared to buy the most toxic poison known to humankind—not just as a safeguard against the twilight creature's bretheren but to discourage all manner of snakes and scorpions from entering my house. (I learned, upon closer inspection, that there was an entry point in the bathroom for these critters—which I promptly sealed with a bead of plaster.)

Cheerful Efi, the plant shop owner, suggested a less toxic solution and sent me packing with a two-kilo bag of sulfur power, which I spread along the perimeter of the house. So, against my better judgment—and fears—I have remained 100 percent organic.

H-O-T

The next time I hear my Maine friends complain about the summer heat Downeast, I will laugh with cruelness in my hardened heart. They have no concept of what “hot” really means. The forecast for the next week calls for temperatures between 38 and 42 Centigrade (that’s 95 to 106), without a lick of humidity. Any outdoor work (in my case, collecting tons of rock turned up by the tractor, watering fruit trees, light house maintenance) must cease by 10 a.m., lest one become the victim of a stroke or cardiac arrest.

T. and K. loaned me a beach umbrella, which serves as a remarkable innovation for a determined beachgoer. Still, there is the issue of walking (i.e., dashing) from the sand dunes to the water, which is excruciating at best. The plunge into the Mediterranean is an utterly delicious tonic to the heat.

Southern Messinia (and western Crete) are the hottest places in all of Europe. Temperatures in the high 80s in November, even December, are not unusual. It is also the sunniest place in all of Europe, with about 320 days of sun per year. This is about the same number of days of fog in Lubec, Maine.

On the subject of fauna. The last resident population of African jackals (the Peloponnese’s version of the Maine coyote) are increasing locally. Each night as I lie in bed the familiar howls come from the valley below our little house, and they are answered by a chorus of village dogs. It goes on uninterrupted all night and is music to my ears---the lovely long howls, the call and response of canines, wild and domestic.

A Most Beautiful Place

We have all experienced the curious paradox, wherein those who live in a beautiful and special place often overlook those attributes. In Downeast Maine I often gasp at the raw beauty of the environment, and yet this is often lost on the locals. Sometimes we never see our backyard for what it really is.

Here in Messinia, the opposite is true. People who have lived here their entire laws marvel at the splendor of their home environment: they comment on the sunrise and sunset, on the very texture of the ocean, on the quality of the light and the essence of the land. It is a kind of perception, a profound appreciation, that is reiterated by the many resident foreigners. The shared appreciation brings these varied nationalites together in a common homage to place. When a local person says “this is the most beautiful place on earth” these are not mere platitudes but a deep love and understanding of what makes Messinia indescribably wonderful on so many levels.

The Bunker

Rocks around the clock

This house is a veritable bunker, the Greek equivalent of the Alamo (with domestic trimmings), constructed of stone, brick, mortar, plaster, and marble dust. It might be my first choice for a last stand, as the Ottoman hordes rise up from the nearby ridge, curved swords in hand, babbling their prophetic, menacing, intolerant nonsense veiled in a piety that sees fit to abuse women and children and for which Western notions of pluralism and democracy are laughable concepts. 

Who needs electricty, really?

In point of fact, this region suffered incredible violence and humiliation during the turkokratia (the Turkish occupation), which lasted 400 years. In the end, and with the help of the British, French, and Russian navies in the nineteenth century, the people rose up heroically and drove out the loathed occupiers following one final scortched earth policy, led by brutal Egyptian mercenaries in the 1830s. People like my friend Dimtri and countless others, speak of the Turkish occupation as if it happened yesterday—the abduction of women and children, the flattening of villages, the vileness of public executions, a policy that took no prisoners, destroyed land and homes, and stole crops and stores.

Ελευθερία η Θάνατος – Freedom or Death. This was the rallying cry in my grandfather's patrida (homeland) Crete. He left Manhattan in 1912--to which he had only arrived a half dozen years earlier--and returned to Greece with one hundred fellow New York-area Cretans, including his twin brother (my great-uncle Kosta) to fight the Turks, ultimately expelling them from Ionannina and points north. My uncle Kosta was decapitated by sword in battle--and papou never let his grandchildren forget the atrocities perpetrated against his generation. After 400 years of brutal occupation, they expelled the loathed Ottoman Turks. The Turks are a fine and noble people, culturally and historically attached to the Greeks for more than one thousand years. Sadly, under the new Turkish sultan, the elements of intolerant and extremism are ascendant pnce again, owing partly to the West's unwillingness to make any principled stand.

My grandfather's story is an example that freedom-loving people the world over might learn from. Today’s “eastern menace” has been replaced by bankers, bureacrats, and politicians. (Although the eastern menace is now rising its ugly, Paleolithic head once again.) But the fearless rallying cries for freedom and dignity, on both sides of the border, remain valid in the twenty-first century.

This blog has self-conciously avoided politics, but some things must be stated bluntly. My country supports vile dictators the world over--in Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the real axis of evil. We are long past the point of being principled peoples with democratic values. Something has to give.

Freedom or Death! People in the West ought to learn the lesson of the suffering endured by the Hellenes and overcome their careless attempts at accommodation with people who will never, ever “integrate” or abandon the Stone Age in favor of basic decency and humanity. It is indeed time to “get real," a concept lost on our so-called leaders in the West.

Approach of the First Day of Summer—Technically Speaking

Althought the calendar states that June 21 is the first day of summer, the reality is that summer begins here in early May and ends in late October, or even as late as December. The ocean reaches its apex of warmth in October—it is bathwater by then.

The heat unfolds a fragrant aroma of wild plants. My favorite is the wild fennel, which, at 105 degrees, wafts across the land and is positively intoxicating.

Never accept de-feat

Hospitality (Φιλοξενία)

Here is the question that one hears upon entering the village: Τι να σου κεράσω; What can I treat you to?

Notions of traditional, rural Greek hospitality were born three thousand years ago. It is a manner of being that is unparalleled anywhere in the world. And for a nation suffering under the heavy weight of austerity (everything taxed at 24 percent; unemployment at 27 percent) it is hard to comprehend the depth and magnitude of hospitality. It is one of the main factors that make this place indescribably wonderful.

Sand dunes at Anemomelos Beach, house on mountainside

View of house (foreground) from Dimitr's vineyard--a Greek summer pastoral

A day doesn’t pass when someone (many someones)—a café owner, a restauranour, a vague acquaintance—isn’t offering me a gift or other: a cup of coffee and a sweet, a tin of olive oil, a bag of oranges and lemons, cheese, fruit, eggs, wine. It is astounding and a constant display of kindness and selflessness.

These are remarkable gestures of generosity, with no iota of quid pro quo, no ulterior motives. Such magnanimity is as delightful as it is universal.

A few nights ago, Panayioti from the sweet shop refused payment for a drink and a sweet. When I persisted in paying, he was visibily hurt—as though it was a rejection of his hospitality. It is a cultural faux paix that I shall not repeat.

Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It?

I promise less text and more photos--but I can't resist pounding this little keyboard. Please, dear friends, I have no pretensions of literary genious. This is mere therapy and righteous bluster from your hapless correspondent, and litttle more.

The Morning Run

It is 8:15 and already the heat is punishing. And yet there is no better time to run (except perhaps at 6:15 a.m.), so I set off on the Methoni-Koroni road, heading up the mountain.

A runner or cyclist has two choices: run up the mountain for a few kilometers--a steady ascent with not a single flat break--then turn and descend, as if on bobsled course, with hairpin turns every 200 meters. The other choice, obviously, involves putting the "easy" downhill section first, which is clearly the wrong choice. The regret is delayed.

On the return leg, with the long views across undulating olive grows that stretch to the cobalt Mediterranean, I see a familiar face in an olive grove near our house. I shout out a greeting and stop for some animated conversation. (All conversation in Greece is animated--replete with a vocabulary of hand gestures and facial expressions that have become second nature after so many visits over so many years). The man, a rugged well-built seventy-year-old named Kosta remembers my name (first and last) from our brief meeting the year before. "Yeia sou, Yianni. How is your family? Where is this wife of yours and the children? We want to treat them all to drinks at the cafe!" I assure him that next summer, come hell or high water, I will bring my dear family. They have not yet "met" their spitaki (little house) in the olive grove.

It is remarkable, a word that does not understate the obvious, that every single villager--all 130 of them--knows me by name. They know my story. They are curious...and, yes, they are busy-bodies, rumor mongers, and often as small-minded as they are big-hearted. Such are the paradoxes of village life.

In full disclosure: this blog reference Finikounda frequently. It is the larger fishing village, a point of reference at the base of the mountain, but it is not our village. Ours is a sleepy mountain village, populated mostly by elderly folks, steeped in tradition. An agricultural hamlet kept alive by a smattering of foreign residents (mostly German), Akritohori (or its Turkish name: Grizi) has no signs of mass tourism. As for infrastructure, there are lovely stone walkways with metal lanterns, a large and rather imposing church, a one-room school, and the village cafeneion in the plateia. Beyond this, there are the sounds and sights of a tradional Greece that is vanishing at an alarming rate: braying donkeys, old women dressed in black, men sipping their Greek coffees and playing their beads in the shade of the plane tree.

I am a resident of Grizi--as the locals say, a Griziotes.