Everybody Must Get Stones
In
a few short days my wife Ann will join me for these final three weeks in
Greece—our first time together in Greece, without our beloved children in tow,
since our wedding on the island of Spetses in 1992. It seems like yesterday
that we won each other’s hearts.
Which brings me to the topic of traditional courting in the nearby villages of Varakes, Kanourio Horio, and Mesohori, which are halfway between Methoni and Pylos. They are divided from the Ionian Sea by three large, pyramidal mountains, the middle one now the home to a dozen wind turbines.
It is said that in the old days, when a boy wanted take a young maiden as his wife, he needed to demonstrate his worth by running from the village up to summit of the highest peak, where a special wildflower grows. He would return with a small bouquet to prove his feat of endurance and commitment.
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| Run this hill, boys |
I’ve run up this mountain on the turbine service road, a serpentine gravel approach that is incredibly steep. But in earlier times, the boys would run up through the impenetrable thicket of thistle and thorns, returning to their true love a bit bloodied and exhausted.
But there was one additional step: asking the girl’s father for her hand in marriage. Apparently the young man could not negotiate the order of these undertakings.
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Building a Stone Wall
Each day the Albanian masons bring a truckload of native stone, carved from a nearby mountainside, which will be used to build a 29-meter-long mortared wall in the coming week.
The wall serves both an aesthetic purpose and a practical one: it will divert the heavy winter rains away from the house and into the olive groves behind our back wall
Earlier in the week I negotiated a final price for this work with the mastoras (master stone mason), my Albanian friend L., whose work is more than capable—it is truly masterful.
“Look, Yianni, if I was building stone wall for the Germans, the price would have been nearly double.” So we agreed on the price and the work has begun.
Like so many of the Albanians that I have come to know and respect over the years, L. does not shy away from hard work. Often completed in the searing Mediterranean summer sun.
When I first began renovating this house (in 2013), the local Greeks would say things like, “Don’t ever pay an Albanian more than 35 euros a day.”
This attitude comes from some (but not all) of those Greeks who spend so much of their day sitting in the shade, playing backgammon, and chain-smoking. I find this attitude both exasperating and disrespectful. It reminds me of how Mexicans were treated in the United States a generation ago.
Laying
the Groundwork
L. told me something about his priorities going forward:
“First, Yianni, I need to fix the old house I just bought [in my village], then I need to buy a nice Jeep, one that can haul a trailer with a tractor.”
Before I had the chance to ask him, “then what?,” he added:
“Only then can I find a wife. I will turn forty this summer, so the time is here.”
I hope his dreams come true. A few years ago, he inquired about coming to America on a work visa—and I did some of the initial legwork on his behalf.
Now, I’m happy that he has stayed here in Greece, where life is better and foreign workers are treated like humans. Otherwise he might have ended up in one of the new US gulags or worse yet—in some internment camp in Africa.
Legends
Legends and myth abound in the rural Peloponnese. A few weeks ago my friend John and I visited the Palaiolimnia (“the many lakes”) in Kazarma, about an hour north of here. They are a series of spectacular crystalline waterfalls that flow for miles through mountain crags and valleys and are interspersed with clear, aquamarine lakes. Since antiquity, the place is said to have been inhabited by fairies and other humanlike creatures that appear to some but not all.
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| Morning run in Maniatiko Valley |
One of those lakes is named Stavroula, after a woman who lived there sometime during the four-hundred-year Ottoman Turkish occupation of the Balkans.
Stavroula was said to have dressed herself and her children as fairies so as not to be hauled off to the local Ottoman bey’s harem as sex slaves. The second lake after the spring, just beyond the origin of this flowage, is named after this woman.
Morning routine
A lifelong distance runner, for at least 53 of the last 67 years, I begin most mornings with my standard run-swim-run before the heat builds.
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| Kandouni, accessible by cliffside |
I usually head down the mountain to the big beach called Anemomilos—one and half kilometers of pristine sand dunes and shoreline. The beach at Loutsa is much closer, but I’ve been scared off by the two-meter-long lafiatis (the four-lined snake, the largest in Europe) that was seen there at the end of last month. It is not venomous, but the ochia (horned viper) is deadly. Both can be found near this special place.
While I’m a certified snake-phobe, I’m also an ardent swimmer. So I’m usually not deterred.
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Yesterday morning, after my mid-run birthday-suit swim on the big beach, I dressed and continued down the beach in the direction of our home, encountering the nude tai chi class on the ocean’s edge. They were very Zen and resolute, so I said a quick good morning and ran a half circle around them.
I suspect that the same activity on eastern Maine’s Cobscook Bay would have a less than positive reception among the locals.
It was obvious to me that his group of well-tanned Swedes had never encountered a deer fly or a marine warden.
Bread in Greece
In antiquity, wheat was considered a gift of the goddess Demeter. Bread made from hulled barley as well as barley porridge (enhanced with pork fat) formed the basis of the ancient Greek diet—along with vegetables, legumes, olives, and olive oil. This gruel was the Spartan “super food” that is referenced by the ancient writers.
Today, bread is central to Greek life and culture, to such an extent that the cost of a loaf of bread is controlled by the central government. A bakery that sells bread for more than the maximum faces severe fines.
This is a country that, at the very least, won’t let merchants fleece consumers from the staff of life.
In the ancient Greek world, bread was used in sacrificial offerings to the gods, and there was said to be more than seventy-two types of bread. Oddly enough for the modern gastronomist, white bread was favored over all others in both Greece and Rome.
Communities and entire city-states famously vied for the honor of having the best bread.
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The
Paradox of Aging
I first came to Greece as a fourteen-year-old in 1973 and then returned again the following summer, and was nearly drafted into the junta’s army following Greece’s ill-fated military incursion in Cyprus. In 1979 I took up residence in Athens, where I studied archaeology/classics and modern Greek at a college program in the tony neighborhood of Kolonaki.
On the weekends I chose to leave my American friends behind and head to some godforsaken rural village by bus, or I would take the old rusty, slightly listing ferry to the island of Spetses from where my maternal ancestors hailed. (The other half are from the island of Crete.)
My grandmother was born in Spetses in 1899. When I was a child she told me stories about her “poor, impoverished island home,” which is now a wealthy, Riviera-like setting for the super rich, who arrive in private helicopters, while many of the locals are still relatively poor.
Why did I leave my American friends behind? Because I wanted to learn to speak Greek. So I put myself into impossible situations—the total immersion method of learning a second language. I also made friends with Greeks (including a few girlfriends) and became absorbed by traditional culture, including music and poetry.
As the Greeks say, “περναει τα χρόνια” (the years pass) and now on the cusp of 68, the phrase is even more salient.
But what is age, after all? My friend Niko, the poet, identifies three ages for us humans: the poetic, the biological, and the chronological.
So, to clarify: I am poetically 6, biologically 24, and chronologically 67 1/2.
I had to get that off my στήθος (chest)!
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| Turkish aquaduct (my friend) |
Conspicuous
Consumption
To say that the southwestern Peloponnese is “traditional” or maintains many of the cultural attributes that I fondly recall from nearly fifty years ago is not an exaggeration. These traditions have faded elsewhere, but here there is vibrant connection with the past.
But like many once-unspoiled places the world over, things are changing.
Most of all, this incredible region has been discovered by northern Europeans—in particular, wealthy Germans, Swiss, Austrians, and Dutch. They have money and they throw it around with reckless abandon. It employs local people but it also changes them.
The blight of conspicuous consumption, about which those of us living on coast Maine know all too well, erodes some of this region’s character. Slowly, for sure, but it’s happening. Sadly.
About thirty kilometers to the west lies the multi-billion-euro Costa Navarino resort, a blight (in my opinion) on an unspoiled coastline. Rooms cost anywhere from 1,200 euros per night to an astonishing 26,000 euros per night—most rooms include balconies with infinity pools…even though the pristine ocean is within view. This place gobbles up the resources that are in short supply: water and electricity, namely. But the resort also drives up prices for mere mortals and “necessitates” expanded roads and other infrastructure, to the detriment of local people.
Last year, Matt Damon filmed Odysseus, a soon-to-be released film there, in the iconic Voidokoilia. It will surely shine a new light on this region.
But worst of all is the building craze and the consequent transfers of long-held ancestral properties to those who seek to build McMansions, usually with swimming pools, and that are surrounded by large fences or walls.
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| Fini's one-room schoolhouse |
One friend made a cheeky comment recently: “You know, the Germans. They like to occupy the beach front; they like to occupy the highest ground; they like to occupy … Poland.”
But it’s clearly not just the Germans. Wealthy Greeks are in on the land grab, too, and the result is that local kids (like local kids in eastern Maine) may never be able to afford a home in the region in which they were born.
We feel good—and we are told by the villagers that we should feel good—for having renovated an old, traditional home rather than having built a new steel-reinforced concrete monstrosity (which we could not afforded anyway).
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| Scene of the crime |
The earthquake
Last night I headed down to Finikounda at sunset, for a drink on the waterfront and to watch some of the FIFA football matches.
Just after parking the car, I began walking by the village church and felt the ground moving. The line of parked cars and trucks began jumping a few inches off the ground and rocking violently. The kids in the adjacent playground began screaming, as the electricity lines swayed up and down. I joined them in the relative safety of the swing sets and jungle gym, far from any buildings.
Some were really frightened. Others were totally unfazed.
I arrived at the sweet shop and the owner’s son, Dimitri (my casual bouzouki teacher) offered the following fatalistic comment: “Hey, Yianni, you better order a beer before the tsunami hits.”
We soon learned that the earthquake was a 5.6 on the Richter scale and was centered between Schiza and Sapienza islands, no more than six or seven kilometers away. There were, in fact, a series of five or six recorded earthquakes, all within twenty-five or so kilometers.
Playing
with the Rembetes
The musical genre called Ρεμπέτικα / Rembetika came to Greece in the early 1920s after “the catastrophe” in Asia Minor, where only a few years earlier the Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. The Greeks living along the Black Sea, as well as largest population of Greeks on the Asia Minor coast, were forced to flee. Ethnic Greeks who had lived along the littoral for over 3,000 years were raped and slaughtered by the Turkish Army, which advanced from the hinterland to the coast. This was the first genocide of the twentieth century and it was the event from which the word “Holocaust” was born.
More than 1.5 million Greeks became refugees in mainland Greece. They brought with them a unique “Asian” culture, art, foodways, and dress, and a pure Ionian dialect that dated to 800 bce. They also brought their music and musical instruments. Some were known to the mainland Greeks, but they were considered exotic.
A fusion of culture, music, foodways began in earnest.
Rembetika was a result of this catastrophe and forced exchange of populations. It has been described, a bit inaccurately, as the “urban blues.” The music of the East included different “roads” (or musical modes)—the Doric, the Ionian, the Lydian—largely unfamiliar to Western ears.
Their music and their unusual variants of traditional Greek instruments created an artistic dynamic that is still heralded, one hundred years later, as unique and perhaps a bit “foreign.”
Hashish and hash dens were a part of this Anatolian culture. It found its ways into the urban Greek settings—it was part and parcel of the “underclass,” and these venues were frequented by prostitutes, drug addicts, leftist philosophers and politicians, and by artists and poets. The nargile, or hookah, was emblematic of the Rembetes.
A new generation appreciates this music and many have mastered its forms.
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Live from the (Ζαχαροπλαστειο) sweet shop
Last night I picked up a guitar at Gardenia, the sweet shop on the waterfront, and played with Dimitri and Ilias. Dimitri expressed an interest in learning the American blues repertoire; and I’ve always wanted to learn how to play the three-chord bouzouki, a central character in Rembetika music.
Here is a video of last night’s “master class”... although the Blues 101 for baglama, with yours truly accompanying Dimitri, is too large to upload. An edited version to come...
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