Settling In

 

Settling in

After just a few days here in Messenia, living in a small stone house tucked into an olive grove, I have settled into something of a “routine”: running in the mornings before the heat builds, engaging in some house cleaning/organizing, gardening, reading, and of course seeing old friends and meeting new ones. Also, swimming at every opportunity.

A few days ago I traveled the 15 kilometers to Pylos, the largest regional town, to do some banking. Greece’s bloated bureaucracy requires so much from so many. It is an exasperating process that joins people, Greek and foreign alike, in a common form of misery. Everyone hates the government. Perhaps this a universal concept.

For a foreign resident there is a required annual tax return that certifies I don’t work here (untrue), that I bring in hard currency (minimal or largely untrue) from abroad, and that I have no assets other than the house (true). Transfers of dollars to euros are documented with the “pink copies”—which stopped being pink more than twenty years ago—that serve as official verification of such transfers. These are needed in order to complete the mandatory tax return. But now you can no longer walk into the bank and ask for the pink-now-white receipts. Instead, you need to schedule a “rendezvous” and mine is next Monday at the worst possible--arguably criminal--time: noon should be beach time! 

Camp Yianni

 

I neglected to bring an alarm clock and can’t yet navigate my new running watch, which is capable of doing more than the most astute personal assistant. But I am clueless, so my alarm clock is a combination of factors: the crowing rooster across the road (at 4 a.m.), the incessant squawking of birds nesting in the ceramic roof tiles, and the sun rising lazily over the mountain and into my face.

Unlike far eastern Maine, located on the eastern edge of the time zone, southern Greece is located on the far western end of the time zone. So, by the time the sun rises over the mountain it is already 8:30 in the morning and I’ve missed the best hours of the fledgling day.

 

Warning, warning

Our house checker Dimitri called yesterday to warn me about the ochia that he has dispatched in our garden. The ochia are snakes, diminuitive in size but the most venomous snakes in Greece. Unlike its larger cousins—some more than two meters long, who are welcome consumers of rodents and which slither away at the approach of humans—the ochia lies in wait, ready to strike quickly and repeatedly. With its black upper body covered with grey diamond patterns, it is nicely camoflauged and easily mistaken for a stick or a piece of dry grass.

Never, ever, pick up a rock barehanded or put on pair of sandals without shaking them out first. Scorpions love the shade.

When we installed the perimeter fence (to keep out the wild boar, the Gypsies, and the old ladies collecting wild greens), the installer asked me to trim the oleanders along the perimeter. That was my first encounter with an ochia, curled up in the base of an oleander. I called over the fence installer, who cried out “ochia!” to his young son/helper. His cry was more one of happiness than dread. He took the pruners from my hand, reached fearlessly into the mass of overgrowth, and gently grasped the snake, just below the head, between the blade: then he gleefully demonstrated a decapitation. It was good for a week’s worth of nightmares for this snake-a-phobe.

“Yianni, if the ochia strikes you, it is important to drive quickly to the Pylos clinic for an injection before you begin convulsing and become paralyzed.”

There is nothing like helpful local information.

I showed him the snake-bite kit that I had obtained from a departing German resident years earlier. It’s lengthy instructions are in German. He scoffed and suggested I purchase a German-English dictionary and study it in advance. Or ditch the kit and head directly to Pylos.

 

Kandouni, accessible by cliffside

Every stick looks a snake

Cretans in our midst

My paternal grandfather and grandmother hailed from the southernmost island of Crete, so it was with some surprise that I learned, during our six-month sabbatical here in 2009, that many of the local residents have Cretan heritage. Like my surname, theirs also end in “-akis,” which is a marker of that island’s people.

Occupied by the Ottoman Turks for nearly 400 years, the persistent victims of brutality, genocide, and frequent shake-downs, waves of Cretans departed by caique (wood fishing vessels) for the southern Peloponnese under cover of darkness beginning in the mid-1850s. Crete was liberated in 1898, after a series of bloody insurgencies, and became a sort of nation within a nation a few years later, and then a full-fledged part of Greece around 1909.

It is an understatement to say that the people of Crete are “different”—many Greeks consider them total mental cases, knife-wielding people who are feared, respected, and sometimes even venerated for their bravery, both during the Ottoman period and especially during the Second World War. Thus is my heritage.

The Cretan resistance to the German invaders was nothing short of epic. A dozen members of our family were executed, against the village church, for their resistance activities in 1943. To die defending Crete was the utmost honor and the rallying cry, “Freedom or Death,” isn’t just a boney phrase of endearment.

One of the best descriptions comes from the military historian Antony Beevor, whose magisterial study, The Battle of Crete and the Resistance, offers one of the finest descriptions anywhere of the modern Cretan:

“The Cretan character—warlike, proud, compulsively generous to a friend or stranger in need, ferociously unforgiving to an enemy or a traitor, frugal day-by-day but prodigal in celebration…” (1998; repr. 2014, p. 65). These people can drink, dance, and kill—often simultaneously. It is a wonderful patrimony of which I am immensely proud.

 

On Crete's coastal plain (as here on the mainland), wealth is measured by the number of olive trees one can call their own. But in the mountains, from where our family hails, wealth is measured by the number of sheep and sons. Both sheep rustling and vendetta are part and parcel of mountain life.

That essential character remains unblemished, both in my family and in those Cretan-Messenians in my midst. It joins in a curious way. We are ready to kill or to dance, depending on our mood. Both can be useful these days.

 

Olives from our trees

An African gale

Our village is called Akritohori. My sloppy translation is based on the two parts of the name: akri (edge) and hora (village). So I offer the following: “village on the edge,” for which there is some topographical validity. We are unapologetically “edgy” folks.

The village also goes by its old Turkish name: Grizi (“grey,” which describes the rocky mountains that surround it), and someone from Grizi is called a Grizaios (female: Grizaia). My dear poet friend Niko, the unoffical culture keeper in Finikounda, announces my presence in the cafeneion: “Look, here comes the Grizaios!”

Last night I left our traditional mountain village after sunset and traveled the three kilometers down to Finikounda, the nearest main village on the ocean. My plan was to watch the Final Four in the European basketball championship.

Against all odds, Greece (a poor nation of just 10 million) had two teams in the final four. Although I am not a huge fan, the entertainment, I was certain, would be in watching those watching the game. I was hardly disappointed by the anarchy at the sweet shop, where the locals squealed at every basket gained, and then threw wads of napkins at the TV for every basket missed. It was a premier entertainment—although both of the Greek teams lost to their powerhouse northern European rivals.

 

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Last night an enormous gale blow in from North Africa, bringing supercharged heat, dust, and enormous waves. The entire house shook through the night and when I woke I expected a downpour but instead was greeted by a clear blue sky but even stronger winds and heat.

I chased my clothes line through the pasture, made a coffee, and then sat down to write.

After siesta hour, when the air temperature has cooled, I will plant another lemon tree and spread the ellathion, an organic snake repellent--suphur powder--around the perimeter of the house. 

Organic snake repellent (sulphur)

Another lemon tree to plant