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.