Until Next Year…

 

Yesterday Jonathan was asked if he would like to harvest a vineyard early on Sunday morning. After going to bed at 2 a.m., a 6 o’clock alarm was…alarming. A strong kick of Nescafe, a few dry cookies, and he met Yiota at the vineyard.

The owner arrived in his tractor, pulling a trailer with dozens of plastic boxes. A thick plastic sheet was set on the bed of the trailer, plastic bins were set between the rows, knives were produced, and the work began. Not quite awake, Jonathan managed to slice is thumb deeply in the first few minutes, a fact that he tried to disguise with little success.

 

Baskets were filled and then dumped into the trailer bed lined with plastic. The grape varieties—red, pink, and white—were combined in the trailer. A lot of conversation ensued among the harvesters, and four hours later Jonathan could claim to have made fast friends with another dozen villagers. The total harvest was close to three metric tons, all of which will be hauled off tomorrow morning to a large wine press in Pylos. For his efforts, the owner--whose name is, oddly enough, Dionysios--sent Jonathan off with three large plastic bags of grapes—about 20 pounds of each variety. The explanation that he would be traveling by plane to America in the next 24 hours did not seem to phase his compatriots. "Oh, wonderful, bring them to your children,” one man shouted, and everyone shook their heads in agreement.

 

Jonathan has now satisfied his longtime aspiration to become a Greek αγρότη (farner)—harvesting grapes and olives, taking long afternoon siestas, swimming twice a day, and making lively παρέα (company) with his neighbors late into the night.

 

 

A fire raged to the north today, made even more frightening by the strong gales. Plumes of thick, black smoke approached the beach. The cloud gave the ocean a bizarre copper hue.

The ride to Athens on Monday took a mere 3 1/2 hours, a consequence of the upgraded highway system. He was indignant when passed by a full cement truck on the windy roads near Kalamata...and then later by a Mercedes hearse.

 

Me and My "Bebe"

Hey There, Bebe

 

Last night Jonathan and Dimitri visited the Thines Campground, just west of the village, where the two enjoyed an unusual feast—freshly speared fish and wild, migratory birds called ορτίκη (ortiki). The birds migrate from northern Russia and North Africa. As the campground owner commented: Τρώμε ολα που πηταιε και ολα που κολουμβαιε (“we eat everything that flies, and everything that swims).

In the early morning, Jonathan applied a second coat of varnish on the new wood, inside and out, perhaps the final house task on his penultimate day in Finikounda.

 

 

Nearer to midday, he was treated to a cruise aboard <Μπεμπη> (Bebe), just as the air cleared and the wind began to rise. Captain Kosta motored his sixty-year-old caique, a traditional Greek fishing vessel, to the offshore Oinousses islands (Sapienza, Santa Maria, and Schiza), exercising some degree of prudence as the sea gradually built. Within a few hours, a stiff breeze had become a full gale.

 

 

 

 

We anchored at the remote (accessible only by water or by narrow path) beach of Marathi, in the general vicinity of last week’s wild fires, where we swam and had some refreshments. Getting back to Finikounda harbor required no small amount of skill and persistence.

Friday the Thirteenth

 

Friday the Thirteenth

After a late night in the village, with precious little sleep (4:00-8:00 a.m.), Jonathan dragged his tired self up to the little house to continue with the varnishing in the relative cool of morning.

Stopping at an overlook with the long view to Finikounda, for a photo in the soft light of morning, he climbed to rock outcrop, took the photo, lost his balance, and tumbled down a steep gravely embankbank. It feels like a second toe might have been broken—a record for one week. And then he remembered: today is Friday the Thirteenth.

Jonathan met Yioryio, who was grazing his goats in the parched pasture near the old stone. Festooned in his complete Fidel Castro outfit—including the little green hat—he was a vision of pastoral resistance. He promised to stop by later in the day to check on Jonathan’s progress.

Across from the little house, a half dozen pickup trucks were parked and a dozen or so villagers were harvesting their grapes. (Jonathan will help Yiota and Taki in this endeavor on their land on Sunday morning—his last full day here.) There was a loud chatter from the gatherers, their straw hats rising and falling above the vineyard.

Last night Jonathan was treated to a fresh batch of loukoumathes, kindly offered by Yiota. A loukoumathe is a fried dough ball ( in extra virgin olive oil, of couse) that is drizzed with honey and freshly ground cinnamon. What made this treat even more special was an added delicacy—a thick syrup made from reduced grapes. This is an expensive item and hard-to-find in Greece and the taste is singular.

----------

Yiota told Jonathan about a tsunami that hit Loutsa in 1945. There had been a severe earthquake, and the residents of Loutsa—then a village, today a collection of beach houses and one taverna—fled to the higher ground of Akritohori, near to where Jonathan is fixing the old house. One family fled with their eight children, only to learn when arriving on the mountain that they had left a young son behind.

The tsunami obliterated the village of Loutsa but somehow the boy survived. Now an elderly man, he lives in Finikounda.

Jonathan’s friend also recalled a more recent earthquake, the one that was centered in Kalamata in 1997, which resulted in much destruction, loss of life, and a subsequent rewriting of the building codes for all of Greece. Yioryio and his  wife gathered their children in a rush, and drove up the mountain to Akritorhori, but thankfully there was no tsunami then.

European Basketball

Last night the Greek national basketball team defeated reigning two-time champion Spain in the final quarter of the European semifinal. When the buzzer rang out, there was a single howl of delight that issued from every bar, cafeneion, and tavern.

 

What a Beach Life Can Be

 

Tired and sweaty from hours of varnishing and moving rocks, Jonathan drove the five minutes down the mountain to the big beach, where he languish in his birthday suit with a handful of German and Dutch sunbathers. From the vantage of his beach towel, he could look across the bay and up the mountain, roughly spotting the location of his family’s little spitaki. In the photo above it is just above and to the left of the three houses that sit alone to the right.

 

One of those ethereal moments that we humans sometimes encounter. Suddenly a butterfly landed by his foot, a few yards from the surf (see photo). A truly magical moment in time.

 

 

Roll Up Your Sleeves

Jonathan spent several hours at the house, priming the new windows with Yioryio's help. The two drove to the west of Finikounda in search of painting materials and came up short at the first few stops--the paint shop's shelves were bare. It was no better in Methoni. The effects of the economic crisis, so profound in Athens and other large cities, are more nuanced here in the countryside, where people have plenty to eat but still struggle just the same, with established businesses closing unceremoniously, or simply subsisting.

Finally, the large building supply center, located on the outskirts of Pylos had everything we needed--and more. It would put to shame its equivalent in Downeast Maine. There is a seemingly infinite supply of υλική (building materials), lumber from Sweden, plumbing supplies from Italy, steel and aluminum products from Greece. The woodworking apparatus is highly computerized, a real marvel here in  rural Greece.

Later in the day, Jonathan followed some British friends to the village of Exhoiko (population 25) where we purchased three wooden chairs for the little the metal table purchased yesterday.

 

Windows 2013

The Final Four

Jonathan’s time in Messinia draws to a close and there is a silent urgency to these last four days. There is work to do on the house, friends to visit, places to see. And some really good food to eat...

Last night, while heading up the mountain for a five-mile run, Jonathan bumped into his friend Dimitri, who had invited him a few days earlier to explore the fire damage across the mountain toward Tsapi. “How bad was the fire?” he asked. “We lost 2,300 olives trees,” went the reply.

 

Such loss from fire is not measured in the number of acres burned—the unit is “stemata” in Greece, where one acre equals about four stremata—but in the number of trees damaged or utterly incinerated. In Greece, the indigenous trees (pines, etc.) are the property of the state even on one’s own property, and cannot be cut down, a concept that would strike a Maine woodsman as totally anathema to the most basic notion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of freedom.

 

Last night Jonathan and a friend talked about Greek politics, about Greece’s determined drift to the right, the growing animus toward “foreigners” (in this case: Albanians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Africans, Syrians—most of whom are economic migrants, as the expression goes), and most alarmingly the rise of the police state. Beneath the bucolic surface, the fine beaches, the sights and smells of summer, a darkness lurks, and an uncertainty about the future. Most Greeks have reached a kind of breaking point, most noticeably in the cities. The police in Athens beat demonstrators indiscriminately and there is an Orwellian effort to protect “the public order.”

 

There is a kind of political continuum that begins during the German occupation of World War II extends through the rise of socialism in the late 1970s, and has now exploded in the early 2000s, brought on by “the crisis.” Greece has suffered under the firm hand of “the troika” (IMF, European Central Bank, European Parliament), and the extreme austerity measures have become Greece’s cross to bear. The extreme right-wing party, Golden Dawn (Χριση Αυγή), largely but not totally confined to Athens, takes its basic values from a seemingly remote Nazi era. Most people connect this neo-Nazi group more broadly with the police, and many see the hooded “anarchists” in Athens, the ones throwing petrol bombs on the evening news, as off-duty police who give justification to an intensifying police state. The party and its adherents are small but growing, and they are noisy, fearsome, and loathed by most centrist Greeks—who are sensible, generous, and welcoming to foreigners of all stripes. But during hard times, the right-wing message finds receptive ears—especially among the poor, the disenfranchised, and the elderly.

One finds some manifestation of politics at every café table, which is hardly a new phenomenon. Last night Jonathan sat with a collection of local friends at the cafeneion. The irony of America’s plan to “punish” Syria is not lost on them: A president who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize now argues—no, he pleads—with the U.S. Congress for war. The articulate, polished proposal for a “limited” and “punitive” war will surely bring even greater misery to the Syrian people and to those countries (like Greece) that exist on the periphery.

Of Ancient (and not-so-ancient) Places

Jonathan finally visited the little church, named Agia Paraskevi, located across the field from his temporary house. The church was rebuilt on the ruins of a Byzantine chapel in 1949, and the surrounding fields are now considered an archeological site—although all of Greece is an archaeological site.

 

After some delay, our windows were installed today, and the work is really first-rate—hand-made wooden windows, with double-glazed glass, with simple but elegant wrought-iron hardware.

 

After the carpenter left, Jonathan went to Kalamata—about 50 kilometers distant—for a necessary visit to the Ministry of Finance. Surely this is one of Hercules unspoken labors: contending with the Greek state. The bureaucracy is punishingly lugubrious, to say the least.

Jonathan and Yioryio spoke about the range of mountains visible beyond the Messinian Gulf, in the direction of Sparta. The faint outline of Kaiados, or at least its generally vicinity, is visible. This is the steep cliff from which the ancient Spartans hurled their weakling children and left them to perish. On “our” side of that enormous range of 8000+foot mountains is Messinia, the ancient home of the helots,  captive peoples whom the Spartans held in servitude for 600 years.

We diverted along the undeveloped western approach to Kalamata, a pristine sandy beach of many miles length. We passed a sign, placed by the European Union, announcing the approach to a gypsy (Roma) village built with untold Euros thrown at Greece from Brussels. The village, only eight-years old, has been abandoned, the residents have stripped and sold the windows, doors, and siding. A once model village is now a ghost town. The actual gypsy encampment—a motely collection of corrugated tin and tent—lies a kilometer further along the road, past vast fields of peanuts and potatoes. The Roma village respresent an EU humanitarian-cum-public-relations campaign gone badly awry, one in which politicians are said to have reaped the benefits of someone else’s good intentions.

We approached an old neighborhood of Kalamata, not long ago notorious for its knife-wielding residents and narcotics-dealing gangs. Now Kalamata has changed much for the better, transformed into a tourist destination and a relatively safe place with excellent food--but it is still a dusty city.

Jonathan and Yioryio walked to the ministry through neighborhoods, thick with concrete apartment complexes, that just a generation ago were verdant fields, productive groves, and orchards.

After Mussolini’s demise, in 1943, the Italian troops stationed here were sent by train to Athens by the Germans. Their route was sabotaged—apparently by the Germans themselves--and the surrendered troops were cast into a ravine and drowned. So the story goes.

History here Greece, particularly in rural Peloponnese, is alive and present, even 70 years on. The passions have slumbered but never entirely vanished.

A Run at Dusk

Jonathan set off for the little house on the mountain at sunset, keys in hand. The run from Loutsa, the nearest beach, takes about 12 minutes. (The descent is a little faster, needless to say.)

 

He swept the floor of sawdust and marveled at his new cafeneion table, purchased earlier today at Praktiker, a German chain with an enormous box store in Kalamata. Now he can boast a “furnished”house—proudly displaying exactly one piece of furniture.

Wild Things

The Wild Things

 

“We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.”

                                                                        Lawrence Durrell, Justine

 

In speaking of the wild creatures of Messinia, here in the southwestern Peloponnese, one would be remiss not to include among the feral beasts the relatively tamed human inhabitants—who are wild in the most attractive and endearing way. Our local friends are full of life, laughter, generosity, and a veritable catalog of tall tales, gossip, and rumor. And it is generally accompanied by vibrant gesticulation.

Beyond the people that populate this corner of Greece, however, they are two special four-footed animals, the jackal (τζακάλι) and the wild boar (αγριογούρουνο). The former were once abundant throughout the Balkans (along with wolves and bear, which still do exist in Macedonia), but now they are a protected species. By all accounts, they are resurgent. Not unlike the coyotes that populate the Maine woods, jackals are apparently fierce but elusive creatures known to prey on sheep and goats. They are not unfamiliar to the farmers and pastoralists of remote sections of the southern Peloponnese. Their howl is more akin to a human scream, an unnerving vocalization that Jonathan has definitely heard late at night during the past week.

More damaging and abundant are the wild boar, which can grow to more than 400 pounds and are a species hunted for their meat, or eradicated by farmers who contend with the damage they bring to the fields, orchards, and vineyards. A British friend, who lives in Mistraki, a traditional stone-house village 10 kilometers from the coast, struck one with his car while returning one night from taverna in Finikounda. By all accounts, the boar won and the car lost in this particular meeting.

 

Hot, hotter, and hottest

According to Jonathan’s friend Niko, the three warmest places in all of Europe are Finikounda (in whose general area he now calls “home”), Sparta/Githeion, and Crete. Even now, in mid-September, daytime temperatures soar into the 90s (Fahrenheit, of course), while at night the thermometer has not yet fallen much below 75. Last night we sat out by the water’s edge until 2 a.m., wearing shorts, flip-flops, and tee shirts, buffeted by a warm breeze blowing from North Africa.

On this note, in the morning Dimitri invited Jonathan to join him on a tour of the fire zone (now extinguished, or so it seemed) but Jonathan demurred as he was working on the house before the sun became too hot and retreat to the sand dunes was the only sensible course. Dimitri promised that we would set off on this sojourn sometime in the next few days. At 6 p.m., Jonathan and his Loutsa neighbor Paul emerged from their houses at the sound of the fire planes, which passed low overhead in tandem. Had the fire rekindled, or were they off to another conflagration? Neither of us was sure.

Jonathan’s “work” consisted of cleaning up the broken roof tiles and making a pathway to the front door; and then using some discarded materials to build a bench on the east side of the house.

Today marks his last week in Messinia, and there is a lot to accomplish beyond working on the house. Contending with the Greek bureaucracy (the tax office in Kalamata, the land registry office in Koroni) are necessary but hardly welcomed diversions. Also there are a handful of invitations, for meals and drinks, with various friends, both resident foreigners and locals.

But tomorrow will be an important day in the saga of our little house. The carpenter will install the window frames and then double-glazed glass, and we will discuss construction of a sleeping loft (πατάρι) that will accommodate two beds and closets. We are trying to make best use of this little space.. Yioryio’s son, Taki, will take Jonathan to look at nearby house that runs entirely on solar power. Here in Greece, one’s property tax is assessed on the electric bill, every other month. No electricity, curiously, equals no property tax—or at least not until the state figures out how to tax those who are off the grid.

 

 

Jonathan will also discuss plantings with Yioryio, who is a master gardener. The plan is to plant drought-resistant ornamentals later this fall: lavender, cypress, and the like. In the winter, with sufficient space and an ideal climate, we will plant lemon and orange trees, grapes, palm, and, of course, olives—and there will still be a small plot for a vegetable garden.

 

A vision of the beach at high noon.

 

The Pangyri--Neo Koroni

The weather began to change in the past few days. As the locals say, the air was coming from North Africa, which is not too far distant, and that it was full of skoni (dust) from the desert. Today’s afternoon downpour, though short-lived, created a pleasant siesta time, and cleared out the “old air.” Even an hour of napping offsets the woefully inadequate night-time slumber. Going to bed at 3 a.m. and waking at 7 a.m., night after night, doesn’t fit the bill for restful sleep.

After siesta, Jonathan ran up the mountain to the little house, where he met Yiota and her brother Taki. Taki has ushered us along in our quest to make this old spitaki a reality. His father, Yioryio, on the other hand, has been the driving force behind this project: the architect, the engineer, the chief mastoras, and for this will be always indebted to him. For his own children, he has restored (in the case of his son) and built anew (in the case of his daughter) remarkable works of architecture—traditional stone houses with terraces, walkways, and commanding, uninterrupted views of the ocean. Jonathan’s respect for this man and his breadth of knowledge increases every day. He is a master organic gardener, pastoralist, builder, and font of local lore and legend.

Yioryio stopped by the house at 8 p.m., just as a crescent moon was falling behind the sunset on a bizarrely flat, pink ocean—a singular vision—and he invited Jonathan to join him and his wife at a panayri. In the broadest terms, a panayiri is a “celebration,” one that is connected to an Orthodox saint revered by the particular village in which it occurs. The village in question was Neo Koroni, over the mountain in the direction of Kalamata.

Here is Messinia, there is a panagyri somewhere nearly every week, and it draws people from the surrounding villages. Life truly is a celebration.

We arrived at 9:30 to a village overpopulated with merry-makers. Rows of stalls were set up on the maze of village roads surrounding the central square, or plateia, manned by Greeks, gypsies (Roma), Senegalese and Nigerians, and a smattering of Chinese. For Jonathan, who has spent a lifetime learning to speak the Greek of his grandparents, it is a bit unnerving and disorienting to communicate with so many others for whom Greek has become a lingua franca.

The goods were mostly cheap, plasticy knock-offs—clothing, gadgets, tools, and toys for children—but the energy, the dickering over prices, had a positively Eastern quality. The bazaar is alive and well in souther Messinia.

The three of us wandered about through the thick warren of stalls, dickering mostly for items that we never purchased in the end, and then found ourselves in the thick rush of the plateia, where a musical group from Kalamata played traditional Messinian music, including the typical Kalamatiano, which brought hundreds off their feet and into the dance circle. The ensemble was painfully amplified—a bouzouki, a guitar, an electric violin, accordion, drums, and piano. The scene was vibrant, and by 1 a.m. the dancing was progressing with unabated energy.

It is a remarkable sight, so utterly unfamiliar to Westerners, to have multiple generations mingling: boys, girls, men, and women, old and young, thoroughly intoxicated with the pleasure of each other’s presence, full of joy and laughter--a common cultural heritage that includes music, religion, dance, foodways, and mythology. As Jonathan’s uncle Yianni told him recently on Spetses island: All that a Greek needs is a glass of ouzo, a friend or two (παρέα, or "company") and a little music, and life’s cares melt away. And so it was in Neo Koroni.

It would be an understatement to say that life is "difficult" in Greece--punishing austerity at the hands of the European Central Bank and the so-called "troika" is positively damning--but people still manage to find that a singular joy of life that eludes so many in the West. It drives the Germans, especially, a little crazy. They are largely footing the bill for Greece's week-by-week survival, and some disbelief reigns among them: how can these people be so happy and carefree while their economy collapses around them? With unemployment now at 26 percent, the highest in the EU, and decades of economy misery ahead of them, the Greeks still find a way to celebrate. Every day, and every night.

Each player was highly talented, but the bouzouki player and the violinist stand out. Jonathan’s bandmates should pay attention to one of the videos—the melody sounds alarmingly like our own “Scully’s Reel.”

What follows is a sampling of video taken at the panayiri in Neo Koroni.

 

 

 

 

The Fire, part 2

As promised here are some pictures of the fire that was finally extinguished this morning. Four fire-fighting plans circled overhead starting at dawn, skimming the bay at 100 knots and they accelerating to altitude again. Unfortunately Jonathan's little camera does scant justice to this operation. The planes are the size of C-130s.

House Renovation

Jonathan met with Yioryio and the two Albanian stone masons at 9 a.m. This was first day where you correspondent actually did real, bonafide work--clearing rubble, cutting brush, and assisted the masons, who poured a concrete pad on the back of the house. As we worked, the firefighting planes continued their sorties. Here's a collection of photos showing the work.

 

After the masons left, Jonathan helped Yioryio and Yiota fill a basket with grapes from the vineyard across from the house. We sat in the shade of an olive tree and ate three varieties of grapes--a bit a nourishment after a several hours of solid work.

 

 

 

Jonathan is staying in the old stone house located to the right of the white chapel (the pointy tile roof), a two-minute walk from Loutsa beach. The house renovation is a ten-minute jog (or 15 minute walk, if that's your mode of travel) up the hillside. The village of Finikounda is further along to the coast to the right.

 

 

 

An enormous thunderstorm raced through from the north as Jonathan was on the beach at around 3 p.m. A pathological fear of lightning was sufficient motivation to make a run to the Fiat Punta, which was parked in the dunes under the shade of an olive tree.

The overcast was a welcome relief, as yesterday's strategic error of falling asleep on his stomach bore terrible consequences. Needless to say, he stood during the performance last night.