Viva Zapata!

 

Viva Zapata

 

Our humble spitaki (little house), surrounded by the olive groves that tumble down to the sea, is imbued with a bit of legend, which is more truth than myth.

Built illegally—that is, without the requisite permits—in the 1970s by a disgraced German federal judge (some say a lawyer) who was on the lamb for some unspecified crime, our house looks nothing like the crumbling structure we began renovating in 2013. We raised the roof, cleared the lot, and planted a bunch of fruit trees: orange, mandarin, lemon, pomegranate, fig, avocado. They are all yielding baskets of fruit. The harvest from the five olive trees, planted in 2013/2014, provides about 20 liters of high-quality Messinian oil.

Zapata's derilict house

 

Named Wolfgang, but nicknamed “Zapata” by the local villagers, this vagrant soul stole from the rich and gave…to himself. He also stole from the poor…and gave to himself. And yet, curiously, he was respected by the locals. The people of the Balkans, as a rule, always appreciate an honest thief.

 

His exploits are legion in the surrounding villages, remembered especially by those who are in their mid-forties or older—although his legend lives on even among those who were not born when he disappeared, as mysteriously as he had arrived. According to many, while sober he was an affable chap; but like so many alcoholics, add some booze and Mr. Hyde emerged.

 

People still defend his actions, which included, among other things, stealing tools, boats, and even a neighbor’s horse, which he managed to hide away in a shed in an outlying village. He built structures on other people's property (one promptly bulldozed by the landowner), and was known to build a fire under a cast iron tub in the middle of the field for washing up, in full view. He drank like a ψαρι, no translation needed.

 

My friend Y., whose family sold me the old house, which they allowed him to build fifty years ago, explains it this way: “Yianni, he wasn’t a bad person, but he wasn’t a good person either. He just was who he was—a thief who liked to drink, laugh, and have a good time.”

 

But “Zapata’s house” remains a point of reference for the locals, including truck drivers from the building supply yard, who need to find me.

Our decade-long renovation

People, can’t we just get along?

 

In any small, rural village, whether on the coast of eastern Maine or in the southwestern Peloponnese, you need to get along with others, even folks you don’t particularly like or respect. Getting along is part of the fabric of any small community, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, or are somehow related. And, besides, you will likely meet in the village cafeneion every day. Its hard to hide from people you despise.

 

But there is one nationality that appears immune to this practical social perspective: the English.

 

Perhaps the attitude is borne of the empire’s arcane class system of yesteryear—rich and poor, educated and under-educated, privileged or not. I have never met another nationality that expends so much energy in bad-mouthing their fellows, looking down their noses at their own countrymen, or effortlessly offering cavalier dismissals of their own countrymen, regarded as somehow “lesser than.”

 

Of gods and legends

There is a kind of continuum in modern Greek society that begins in the pre-classical world, with its basis in ancient myth, lore, and legend. It is the cultural fuel of this small, beleaguered country. The Trojan War might have been fought last week; Plato was the guy next door; art, history, philosophy, mathematics, music, and theater are some kind of unique discovery of our ancestors.

Religion, the highest form of mythology, seeks to explain the world to both the ignorant and the well informed. Truth and understanding is embedded in lore, giving substance to life’s inconsistencies, hypocrisies, triumphs, and failures.

In America we are awash in myth: the myth of Horatio Alger, the myth of racial and gender equality, the myth of divine justification for so many stupid and selfish ways of being and acting.

And so it is, to some degree, in the modern Greek world.

In the beginning—before there was a world—there was Chaos. Out of Chaos came Mother Earth (Gaea) and Uranus the sky. The first children of Gaea and Uranus were the Titans—six sons and six daughters, who in turn had their own children (including several monstrosities).

Gaea’s son, Cronos, killed his father Uranus. Uranus killed all his children—except one, Zeus, who was hidden from his vengeful father by the Muses in a deep cave beyond the Lasithi Plain, in eastern Crete, there song and lyre muffled his infant cries. From the blood of his father was born the Giants, mortal enemies of the gods.

The infant Zeus grew into manhood and took his father’s throne. Then, after a mythological fast forward, the gods of Olympus were born.

So simple. With a multitude of details missing.

 Methoni (Modon)

The southwestern Peloponnese is the site of three largely intact medieval castles, built by the Venetians, and occupied for hundreds of years by various forces. They are located to the east, in Koroni; and to the west, in Methoni and Pylos. All are within a twenty-minute drive…or fifteen minutes if you drive like a Greek.

The castles traded hands—Venetians to Ottomans, Ottomans back to the Venetians, Venetians back to the Ottomans, Ottomans to the Greeks. And more recently, during the Occupation (1941–1944) , to the Nazis during World War II.

 

This morning I drove to Methoni in the early morning, parked near the harbor, and set about running through the village. It was a chance to run somewhere new and fill this blog with photos of a very special place.

Don't gloat over my moat

The southwestern tip of mainland Greece

A boy's home is his . . .