Temenos: A New Season

View down to Finikounda from our village

Can you spot our tiled roof amid the seas of olive trees?

The significance of a changing season is often lost on city and suburban folk, but for rural residents the world over the movement of the sun and moon yields profound consequences. Here in Messinia, in the furthest southwest corner of the Peloponnese, autumn means the first rains arrive, sometimes haltingly, after five or six months of cloudless skies. With the rains come the olive harvest.

Our friend Niko told us that when he was a child, it would rain periodically during the summer. But today Greece, like so many other places on planet Earth, is becoming dryer and dryer. The “old” calendar is no longer relevant in the new climate. Where summer ends and autumn begins, only the skies can tell.

Our trees are full and ready for harvest

This region of Greece grows some of the world’s finest olives, producing an olive oil that has among the lowest acidity—a mark of superior quality—anywhere. Olive oil has been the currency of Messinia for eons: a livelihood for most, but also a cultural symbol. When our neighbors give us a tin of their olive oil (always with a proclamation: “ours is the best in this area”) it is more than a mere gift. The giving is an act of diplomacy, friendship, and pride all at once.

The landscape here is defined by olive groves. One commentator estimated that there are more than seven million cultivated olive trees just in this one prefecture. After a drive in the hinterland, I ask myself: “Only seven million?” The olive groves run in every direction, including up steep embankments, along terraced cliffsides, as far as the eye can see.

A grove of cypress trees

So, when the harvest begins in mid-October (and now, because of climate change, a bit earlier each year) all other activity ceases. The villages empty out, the tractors begin criss-crossing the landscape, and everyone has one tool or another over their shoulder. All hands on deck. And more and more of those hands are Bangladeshi—quiet, gentle people who work 16-hour days for pennies…literally.

Like the blueberry harvest in Downeast Maine--our other home--the tradition of kids doing this work is changing, with Mexicans and Central Americans taking on this task.

But nearly everyone in this region, young and old, participates in bringing in the olives. It is a sight to behold: green mesh drop-cloths are moved from tree to tree; tractors blaze across pastures, with their buckets full of mesh sacks; and the villagers can be seen plying the groves with an interesting array of tools. They beat the trees, shake the trees, climb into the trees and prune while harvesting. It is a major hacking of the trees, which to an outsider seems a bit excessive. But the severe pruning is essential to next year's growth.

Niko says it takes four people to harvest an olive tree: one person wacks the tree to dislodge the fruit; another feeds the pruned branches into a gas-powered hopper; another person fills the sacks for delivery to the local co-op press; and, of course, the fourth worker chain-smokes cigarettes and offers opinions about the entire process.

****************

Our local friends have been incredibly kind and generous with various offers: hot showers, washing machines, borrowed tools, and advice solicited or not. Most of all, electrical outlets. The plan to install a solar array in the spring of 2020 was stymied by Covid.

Earlier today we acquired a small and near-silent generator, which will be sufficient to charge our devices (phones, laptops, hotspot), providing a short-term solution to our powerlessness. Tomorrow we’ll bring it to the local mechanic to clean it up and get it into better running form.

****************

Our friend Niko, a published poet of some regional note, invited us for dinner in the village of Evangelismos, at a traditional stone building, several hundred years old, with an outdoor veranda in the village square beside the church. With his English education and deep erudition, Niko enjoys reading his poems to me. Laced with classic and modern references, I am a receptive audience.

In the past we have sat together for hours working on English translations—he hardly needs my help, but it is an engaging process for both of us. Searching together for the nuances of bold and creative language in translation, I feel humbled that he even asks my opinion.

Earlier this summer he signed a contract with a major London publisher for his latest collection, the first ever published in English translation (he has six volumes in circulation in Greek). In short, a celebration was in order.

The taverna proprietor, Fotis, welcomed us and then sat outside at the table with a carafe of wine in order to explain that evening’s offerings. He spoke excitedly in very fast Greek and I translated for Nia with occasional help from Niko.

In the end, Niko said “enough!” and simply ordered one of everything. The end result was a 14-course meal, eaten slowly and carefully and with some breaks over a period four hours. (A village taverna would never hand a customer a bill, urgin them on. We could have sat there until sunrise.) Our meal included, among other dishes, a large village salad, broiled feta, fried zucchini fritters, zucchini flowers stuffed with spiced rice and baked, tzatziki (thick yogurt with garlic and cucumber), tirokefteri (spicy cheese spread), beet root salad, manataropita (wild mushrooms baked in filo—“my grandmother’s secret recipe”), skordalia (garlic spread), and then spicy lamb burgers as a main course. Nia was delighted that every plate included copious quantities of garlic.

We watched a blood-red moon rise over the Mediterranean, just down the hillside.

Greece now has Covid curfew. All restaurants must close by 1 p.m. (but none do), and there can be no live music after midnight, and dancing is forbidden.

Of course, no one follows the rules. The police pass by after curfew and wave and we lift our glasses in salute to them. They wave vigorously and shout “kale orexi” (bon appetite).

My friend Thanasi tells me that on the island of Mykonos--a place I have no interest in every visiting--the bars don’t open until 1 a.m. Enforcement remains an intractable issue for most things in rural Greece.

Leader of the pack

*******************

This morning Nia took a ride in the little buggy, away from coast and into the heartland. There are hundreds of villages, some abandoned, others with no more than a sprinkling of older residents. There is an ongoing depopulation of these mountain villages. The young people have moved to the city or taken jobs along the coast in the tourist industry. But others, realizing the special nature of these places, have returned to their roots.

And the livin' is easy

After taking a turn down a rough gravel track, I recalled a 13th-century monastery that we had visited in 2009. I asked Nia if she was willing to risk riding along this broken track to this incredible place, which is now being restored by a few Greek stone masons. Here is the monastery of Saint Theodoras, tucked into a tight little valley.