Making friends of strangers

 

Summer hath arrived!

Making friends of strangers

 

Yesterday I met an old man named Niko at the Lahanada cafeneion. He moved back to the village after 50 years of living in Montreal. “This is paradise,” he proclaimed with arms outspread as far as they would reach, looking down the hillside of olive groves leading to the sea, where the cherry-red sun was setting. It was an embrace of his world—and he meant it.

 

He bought me a coffee and we chatted for at least an hour. “We need people like you, moving back to Greece—not off to Germany or Holland. Bravo, son.”

 

In the early morning I heard the familiar clicking of a hoe in the olive grove behind our house. A tall thin man was working the trees, cutting away invasive olive shoots and pruning the lower branches with a hand saw.

 

When I came back from the beach at 3 o’clock, the sun blazing overhead, he was still working away, but now he was at the edge of our fence. I was certain he was Albanian—these are the folks who now do most of the heavy lifting in Greece.

 

“Hello, sir. Are you thirsty, may I offer you a drink?” He nodded wordlessly. “Would you have a cold beer?” His face lit up and he offered a toothless smile.”

 

I handed him the beer over the fence and he squatted, Turkish style, in the shade of an ancient olive tree. His Greek was very heavily accented but we were able to communicate. He had lived in Greece since 1993.

 

“You work very hard,” I said.

 

“If you want to eat, you have to work.”

 

He told me about his life in Albania. He was one of a dozen children, raised in abject poverty.

 

“My mother and father were agricultural laborers. They worked from before the sun rose and until it set. For one day’s work, we would eat a piece of bread. Wild greens. Rarely any olive oil. Never any money. It was all communist mafia then, if you complained you got shot. So we worked and the government took half of what we grew. They were swine.”

 

He told me his name, but it was one of those impossibly difficult Albanian names, with lots of consonants but no apparent vowels. I endeavor to remember names—they are entered dutifully into my little notebook—so I felt no small regret in not hearing or understanding his name. So I called him “friend” in Greek.

 

This morning when I woke I heard the hoe behind the house, circled behind and said, “Good morning, friend.”

 

“Well, hello Yianni.” He had remembered my name, but I could not pronounce his.

 

“How many sakoulas (bags) of olives does a tree like this yield.”

 

He held up his hand with four fingers.

 

“How old are these trees, do you think?”

 

“All of these seventy trees are at least 300 years old, maybe even older.”

 

He told me that he was 54 years old (a decade younger than me) but he looked around 80. A life of labor under the Mediterranean sun ages the body. But his spirit seemed alive and vital.

 

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Four legged thieves

 

“Chris, you won’t believe what happened last night!” I said excitedly to my English friend. “Someone must have climbed my fence last night and stole my shampoo and conditioner off the table behind the house.”

 

Chris laughed, doubting my narrative.

 

There is an abundance of wildlife here—the big creatures, like wild boar and jackals, but also a host of small mammals: rats, mice, and pine martens (κουνάβη/kounavi).

 

“I am 99 percent certain that your shampoo was nicked by a four-legged creature. Last year we watched two rats working together to steal a bar of soap. One rat grabbed the soap and then flipped itself onto its back, clutching the bar of soap, while another rat grabbed his mate by the tail and dragged him off.”

 

I wasn’t sure if I should be relieved that it wasn’t the Gypsies who stole my shampoo.

 

A pool 300 meters from beach? How stupid

Too much money for words

Ancestoritis

 

Greece has long suffered from a phenomenon known in Greek as προγονοπλεξία/progonoplexia or what might best be translated as “ancestoritis.” That is to say, when you live in a nation credited as being the foundation of Western Civilization (literature, politics, philosophy, science, mathematics—culture in general) you have a heavy burden to carry as a modern citizen of an ancient land. Especially when northern Europeans call you “poor” and “backwards.” I added this one to my little notebook.

 

For 400 years, long after the demise of the Classical World—i.e., during the “modern” period—Greeks lived in a vast multi-ethnic empire: the Ottoman Empire, which had crushed and extinguished 5,000 years of Greek civilization definitively in 1453.

 

The resulting second-class citizens (Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Syrians, Egyptians) suffered immeasurably, with daily indignities and violence. This long period of domination, which ended after the Greek Revolutionary period, in 1832, left an indelible mark on the nation and its people.

 

Greece is uniquely situated, geographically speaking, as the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

 

Today a φοβο συνδρομο/fovo syndromo (fear syndrome) persists as it applies to the Turks, Greece’s powerfully aggressive neighbor to the East.

 

In 1912, my Cretan grandfather returned to Greece with about 100 fellow Cretans then living in New York City. They fought and expelled the Turks from Ioannina, a storied place in northern Epirus, fighting mostly with curved swords (scimitars) against a well-armed foe. My grandfather’s twin brother, Constantine (Kosta), was decapitated before his eyes.

 

This is a legacy that is not easily forgotten.

Before the fall

Yesterday afternoon I ran through the olive grove behind the house, onto a rough gravel road, then onto a very narrow path that criss-crossed down to my favorite beach--accessible by boat (only) or by cliff (my choice). 

With the beach to myself I enjoyed a long swim in my birthday suit, then got dressed and ran along the far less perilous shore trail back to Loutsa beach--before the big climb (600 feet of elevation in less than a mile) back to the house.

On the "easy" return I stumbled and fell hard on the rocks and dislocated my pinky finger--it was 90 degrees at the wrong angle, something I had never seen before. I suddenly and instinctively grabbed my finger and yanked back into the socket, which was mightily painful for a moment but necessary.

Subsequently, after returning home, showering, then driving to the village cafeneion, I administred village first aid: ice and ouzo. Then more ice and ouzo. Then I drove to see my nurse/friend Dora at the Finikounda sweet shop by the sea. She recommended taping the fingers together for the night. And more ice and beer. 

The pain disappeared until this morning. Now I can't close my right hand. But, I can still hold a guitar pick!

 

Koudouni beach--all mine for a swim