Jackals beyond the Fence

 

There are no "bad" sunsets here

A few days ago, as I rallied myself for a visit down the mountain to Finikounda in the late afternoon, a chorus of jackals began their sing-song calling. It is totally reminiscent of the coyotes of eastern Maine, perhaps a bit higher pitched--and they are far more elusive.

Turn your volume up and listen to this performance:

Not so much a stranger

There are so many people of Cretan descent living here in the southwest Peloponnese. Refugees from the misery and brutality of Ottoman occupation (250+ years worth)—which had been preceded by a slightly more humane Genoese and Venetion occupation in the Middle Ages. A few boatloads of Cretans arrived here in the 1850s, following one of many nineteenth-century revolutions that brought about retribution in the form rape, plunder, and abject destruction of a proud and resilient people. The indigenous people of Crete have lived in this largest and southernmost of Greek islands since about 3500 bce. They are not going away anytime soon.

Cretans like my grandfather—who immigrated to New York City in 1909, and returned in 1912 to fight the Ottomans in the Battle of Ioannina in northern Greece—are an immensely resilient and determined sort. Capable of extreme brutality themselves, they are as famous for their generosity to foreigners as they are for their ferocity toward enemies or traitors. The Cretans, who endured generations of guerilla warfare and were especially famous for their suicidal bravery, have a unique ethos in Greece. Like Sicilians (my dear wife's heritage), they are knife-wielding, tsipoura drinking dancers, lovers and patriots. They are also known by the mainland Greeks as being just perhaps a little unhinged. Not necessarily in that order.

Perhaps it is borne of so many generations of suffering, resistance, and pride.

And so, as one with Cretan heritage, I find myself especially welcomed in the province called Messinia, on the Greek mainland.

 

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Resisting Tyranny—then and now

Greece was the first nation to defeat and humiliate an Axis power during World War II. In 1940, Mussolini gave Greece an ultimatum: surrender or be attacked. And now, every October Oxi [No!] Day is celebrated with great pride. Greek forces expelled the Italians in short order, pushing them back through the Albanian mountains, with horrific loses for both sides.

Mussolini then pleaded with Hitler for assistance. The following spring, the German Wehrmacht invaded, despite the presence of dug-in British, New Zealand, and Australian troops. Suffering their own loses against a far superior enemy, the defenders withdrew to Thermopalae—a storied place that was defended by the Spartans against the Persians two thousand years earlier—then withdrew further south to Athens as the Germans advanced, then finally to Crete, where the royal family and a remnant government was re-established.

For Hitler, Crete was meant be the crown jewel of the Nazi rollover of Greece, a stepping stone to Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of Russia), and would allow for a secure base from which to protect the oil fields of Ploetsi (Romania) and attack North Africa, where the British were based in Cairo.

But against all odds, the defenders of Crete—the withdrawn ANZAC troops, alongside Cretan irregulars, including men, women, priests, nuns, and even children—fought one of the most amazing battles of the Second World War, annihilating the cream of the German parachute corps, the Storm Regiment, and much of the German Luftwaffe in the Balkans. Germany would never again launch another airborne attack during the war, so severe were the loses.

It is a fascinating and gripping story in which our family participated—and paid dearly with the execution of my father’s uncles and their sons, as young as twelve, all shot against the village church, for supporting the partisans that were led by, among others, the dashing mulilingual British saboteur Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor. 

A bronze plaque marks the spot and lists the names of my recent ancestors. The bullet holes have been mortared over. I tried, unsuccessly, to interview Sir Patrick in 2009, when we first came here to live.

Fighting against fascism...then and now

Cretan cousin and me, 1992

Our family mountain house in western Crete---blown up by the Germans

Four brothers at the Battle of Okinawa

Dad with his kid brothers, beside a wholely aircraft in Okinawa, 1944

But this was no cake walk for the Germans, who were nearly defeated. Winston Churchill demanded the defense of Crete at all costs, but the high command in Cairo were beset with operational errors. Miscommunication, a lack of wireless sets, and a World War I trench warfare mentality were among the failures in leadership.

Nevertheless, priests led parishioners into battle; teachers fought alongside their students; farmers lashed serrated bread knives to their fowling pieces as makeshift bayonets. It was a killing field of enormous proportions. For both sides.

This history is brilliantly told by Antony Beevor in his magisterial Crete 1941: The Battle and the Resistance (1994; repr. 2014). If you are fascinated by military history, like I am, this well-researched and epic history will not disappoint.

 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world

My father, the son of immigrant parents, enlisted with US Marine Corps in 1941, then served in three wars for thirty-plus years, and retired as a lieutenant colonel. He was followed in the early 1940s by four of his younger siblings—all combat Marines in the South Pacific—and a sixth brother who served with the US Sixth Army in Europe under General George Patton.

The youngest brother, Aristomenes, the last to enlist, gave my illiterate Cretan grandmother an affidavit to sign: “What does it say, Artie?” “Just sign it, Mom.”

It stated that he was seventeen years old, therefore able to enlist as a Marine infantryman and join his brothers in battle. He really was only fifteen. He turned sixteen on the beach in Iwo Jima in 1944, during the second landing.

Years ago I asked him if he intended to attend the sixtieth anniversary on Iwo Jima in 2004. He gave me a cross look: “I’m never going back to that fucking place.”

According to a former commandant of the US Marine Corps, to his knowledge no family in the history of the Marine Corps could claim having had five brothers in combat simultaneously: Okinawa, Tinian, Saipan, Solomon Islands, Iwo Jima, and China. Against all odds, they all survived this ordeal. My grandmother had six silver stars on her house in Brooklyn during the war.

Unbeknownst to my father and his brothers, as they fought tyranny and fascism in the South Pacific, their family in Crete was nearly obliterated by fascists.

There is nothing more heroic than fighting for “democracy” (a Greek word) and against “dictatorship” (another Greek word)—whether its 1945 or 2025.

So what is the answer to the current state of affairs?

I believe in my heart that we need a superhuman avenger, like Euripides’ Medea. But even another Margaret Chase Smith, Maine’s great US senator who stood up to Joseph McCarthy in 1950, would do well. An honorable servant of the body politic who will speak truth to power, as they say.

Sadly, none is forthcoming. But to quote the late Stephen Stills: “There’s something happening ‘round here, and what it is aint’ exactly clear.”

 

New Greek words

These new vocabulary words could easily fit into the previous section:

θύμος—anger and/or revenge

δόλος—deception

and finally…

χάρις—gratitude

φιλία—friendship or the kinship bond

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Looking down toward Finikounda

Five-village mountain run

Speaking Greek

Although I heard Greek spoken by my grandparents as a child, I only began the formal study of our family’s language at the age of twenty, when I was an archaeology and classics student in Athens during my junior year abroad from college. It was then that I met the remnants of my Cretan (paternal) and Spetses (maternal) families.

Yesterday at the plant shop in Nea Koroni—where I purchased a mulberry and a replacement fig tree—I had a long conversation with two Pakistani boys. In Greek. It is the lingua franca of the much-abused foreign worker community, those who harvest the olives among other tasks that most (but certainly not all) Greeks now avoid.

It is said that when you begin to dream in a foreign language, you are well on your way to achieving fluency.

I think this assertion is debatable: I dream with a host of grammatical errors and mis-phrasings, twisted idioms, messy vernacular, and questionable diction.

But at least I know what I’m dreaming about.

 

It's wild poppy season

Heritage

While my heritage is Greek, my temperament is decidedly Downeast Maine. For one, I can’t bear to throw anything away, I never miss an opportunity to stay busy at multiple tasks, and I celebrate a frenetic lifestyle of all work and insufficient play. (My family might argue the latter point).

And yet slowing, painfully, a hybrid me is emerging: part Mainer, part Greek villager.

 

More on driving

This dynamic—if sometimes sloppy—handle on modern Greek is especially useful while driving anywhere in Greece. I have at my command the full range of curses, obscenities, and wild gesticulations that exemplify the universe of emotional well-being for the Greek driver.

Stop signs? They are mere decorations on an otherwise unblemished rural landscape—they indicate nothing in particular.

Especially when being followed by another Greek driver, stops signs are a hazard and breezing through them can be a matter of self-preservation.

Stop at your own peril!

Micro-climates in southern Messinia

Spyro, the one-handed Albanian gardener, a friend since 2009, mentioned the micro-climates in this southwesternmost corner of the Peloponnese.

Speaking of our little house and garden, he offered the following:

“Yianni, it’s perfect here—cooler in the summer, less humid in the winter.”

“Here” is compared to “there”—and you can’t get there from here, as we say in Downeast Maine. But “there” is just two kilometers down the mountain on the sea, the settlement called Loutsa where Spyro does most of his gardening jobs.

 

But there really is something to this. It could be pouring in Kalamata, 56 kilometers away, and sunny and cloudless on the beach in Finikounda. My friends call it “the Fini effect,” wherein all the crappy weather gets pushed inland by the steady breeze that blows from North Africa. Downeast Maine is aching for such a phenomenon.

And just across the Bay of Messinia, in the province of Laconia (with Sparta as its capitol), the shadowed summit of Mount Taygetos (9,000 feet elevation) remains partly snow-covered all year.

And from that summit, the ancient Spartans, a warrior culture, threw their weakling children off to the rocks below. An early form of family planning.

 

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After renovations

Inside, exposed roof beams, 2012

Bricking in the WC

Rendering the exterior

Zapata's house

“I live in Zapata’s house”

When the building yard is about to send a truck with cement, lumber, or any other items for “home improvement,” providing solid directions becomes important. Because so many of the roads are unnamed, giving directions can be problematic.

But if the driver is about age fifty or older, I simply say: “I live in Zapata’s house.”

Zapata was a disgraced, corrupt German federal judge who was on the lamb about fifty years ago. His motto was something like, “steal from the rich and give to … myself.” He stole vegetables, horses and sheep, garden tools, etc. In short, he was a gypsy who wasn’t a gypsy. By all accounts, he has likely since died.

His local exploits are the stuff of legend. He built our house illegally in the 1970s on land that wasn’t his. When we purchased the then-derelict building, we paid a fee to “legalize” it, a first step in a total renovation and redesign. But doing so meant we were grandfathered—being able to build a residence in an area that is, for legal purposes, strictly an agricultural zone.

 

The old men at the cafeneion like to say that the current resident has the “spirit of Zapata.” I am not a thief, so I take it as a mixed compliment.

The movie set

Earlier in the spring Matt Daimon and a large cast were here for the filming of "Odysseus," which is due to be released sometime in 2026. Filmed locally and including a full-length period trireme (three levels of oars on both sides of the ship), this $250-million-dollar production was the talk of the village.

There was a call for extras, and I was especially urged by my daughters. But I came too late and missed the boat...or in this case, the trimreme.

I fancied myself as a slave-oarsman, long-haired, greying, sunburned--but I missed my fifteen seconds of fame.

Looking backwards

Not so certain about that loving embrace?

Voidokoilia--just down the road

Greek Independence Day, 2009

At the Acropolis, 2009

I discovered this corner of the Peloponnese during a solo venture in 2007, with the goal of finding a place to bring all five of us--Momma, Baba, and three kids, aged 8, 11, and 13--for what hoped to be a one-year sabbatical. So my kids could learn Greek and all about part of their heritage.

We came in 2009...and have been coming back ever since. The little hovel in the olive grove has become a home, the kids have become adults, and the parents--well, they will always be parents. And for that we are most grateful.