Category: Book

TOURISTS WHO COME to the village think of it as a fishing village, that all of us are fishermen and that we all use nets. They are wrong on all counts. Only a handful of villagers fish for a living, the rest potter around with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success. Some of them with no success at all. There are many ways to fish with and without nets. The technique used will depend on the season, the weather, the boat and the fish being hunted. It will also depend on how hungry you are.
    

Let us take nets for example. Fishermen from Kalymnos and further afield come here in big boats, 15 metres or more, and trawl, indiscriminately hoovering up fish and fauna and destroying the coral and the sea bed prairies that are precious feeding grounds for many species. These fishermen lead a hard life. They sleep on blankets on their nets, turn by turn, two on, two off, working day and night. There are no toilets on their boats, no fresh water for washing. There are no showers. Sometimes they come to the village for an hour or two to wait for the ferry boat, so they can ship their catch to Rhodes. They come to Anna’s to buy chocolate and lemonade and then queue up, ragged and barefoot, to phone mothers, wives and girlfriends to say that they are all right and to ask for news. If you look closely at the crew on these boats you will notice that they resemble one another. They are father and sons, or a group of brothers, or an uncle with nephews. Sometimes it is a couple with their children leading this nomadic life.

What they all have in common is a desire to make money and retire. I once asked a friend of mine if he liked the life of a fisherman. He thought for a while:
What I want is a small house with a balcony by the sea. I want to sit there and eat souvlaki every day.
 

As well as trawling, the big boats also lay out drift nets to catch fish as they go to feed off the beaches in the evening and as they return to deep water in the morning. Locals also use drift nets, but as our boats are smaller the nets are not so long and we can discriminate as to the species we catch. Sometimes we use much smaller nets to catch small fish called atherinos. The system is to cast the net in a loop along the rocky coast, throw stones to drive the little fish into the net and then pull the net into the boat carefully so that the fish are scooped up. While one man can do this alone the process can be time consuming. It may take several attempts to find a shoal of fish and if you catch them it takes a long time to extract them from the nets. Still, they are tasty and good bait and, if you have company and it is not too windy, this is a pleasant way to fish.
    

Atherinos are used as bait for katheti, a lightweight line used vertically with a weight and four hooks. Katheti are mainly used to catch perka and hannos which are the ingredients of a good fish soup. Only in Greece does it make sense to go fishing for soup. Atherinos are also used as bait for paragadi. Most visitors will have seen baskets around the village full of nylon line and with hundreds of hooks along the rim. That is a paragadi. The line can be up to one kilometre long and, every three metres, side lines with a hook are tied at right angles. The nylon is heavyweight and expensive and so are the hooks. It can take two to three days to make a paragadi, hours to catch the bait and several hours to hook the bait to the paragadi. Then you go and throw it into the sea! But you do not throw it anywhere. You decide the type of fish you want to catch and you lay the line over rocks at the depth and at the time where those fish will be feeding. Often you lay the line out at dusk and pick it up two or more hours later in the dark. I won’t tell you the best spots to fish with paragadi. That is my secret. But I will tell you that if you are rowing a boat, or using your engine to go slowly as the line is laid out in the dark and large baited hooks are whizzing by your ear, then you had better trust your partner.

There are many forms of fishing that have evolved over the years. Perhaps the most esoteric and maybe the most ancient is sexual fishing for sepia. These are harmless little creatures from the same family as octopus and squid. Under the water, in the daylight, if you see them as you dive, they are transparent as glass and stunningly beautiful. They are also tasty. The system is to catch a female sepia as she comes into the rocks to lay her eggs. You do this with a small net on the end of a pole. You make certain that it is indeed a female, not an easy task, tie her to the boat with a hook and line and row slowly along the shore. Suddenly she changes colour, black and white stripes run electrically up and down her body. A male is ready to pounce! When it does, you scoop up the surprised suitor with your net and put it into a bucket of water. You have to hurry, however, or you will be sprayed with black ink.

Generally, the smaller the boat the smarter the fisherman has to be, the more selective they can be and the less damage they do to the environment. Hand line fishing is generally more ecological than fishing with nets, but the most ecological method is diving or spear fishing. When you dive, you see the fish, you know how big it is and you decide whether or not to kill it. You can decide only to kill mature fish that have bred and thus ensure there are fish for future generations. Diving can be exciting and dangerous. It is also a psychedelic experience. Nothing prepares you for the sunburst of colours, nor the light and life all around you as you enter this strange and alien world. It is addictive as you dive down, again and again. You try to relax to save energy.     You don’t swim down, but glide, letting gravity and the weights round your waist do the work. I only dive to around ten metres, but the air seems far away when you are that deep and you are on the edge of panic as you swim up to the silver surface. Your breath is gone, and your strength, and there is no margin for error. Hour after hour you dream of big fish. You see a shadow under a rock or at the entrance to a cave; you dive, you hover. Nothing. Back to the surface. You see the shadow again, a tail perhaps. A bit deep for you, but possible. Position yourself, take two deep breaths, hold your nose to protect your eardrums and glide down, arm and harpoon gun out at full stretch. It is a fish. Slowly come close, slowly, slowly. The fish sees you, you fire. Hit. An explosion of blood and scales and you swim gently to the surface, making sure not to lose the fish from the harpoon. It is a nice one, a sea bream . Supper. Agony as it fights, as you carefully transfer it from the harpoon to your line and move on to look for the next fish and the next and the next.
    

Hours pass. This is hypnotic work, addictive, but tiring. The sea is calm now, the sun going down. You swim to the boat and put your gun inside. You unbuckle the weights carefully, so as not to lose them, and heave them over the side. Now the difficult part. You grab the side of the boat, push yourself under the sea, then up like a cork and over, flippers flailing, chest heaving and you are in the boat. The entry lacks dignity, but brings a sense of relief. Anchored off shore alone, if you can’t get into the boat you are dead.
There are more than twenty ways of fishing here, but whatever the method there is one certainty. There are less fish now than there were, even ten years ago. If the slaughter and the pollution and destruction of habitat continues there will be no fish left. Your children will not know of the magic of the sea, or the taste of fresh fish. Some of us try to fish in a sustainable way. The customers could insist that we all fish sensibly. All you have to do is ask.

I cannot believe I am doing this. I am in a little boat, four metres thirty, the sea is wild and I have twenty thousand passengers. I look to see if they are OK. I look in through the mesh, they look out. They seem OK, but then they can’t see what I can; the waves, the rocks, the spray. An English sailor would call this sea lumpy, a Greek, with equal understatement, would say ekei thalassa, there is sea.

Thank God it is not windy. Waves can cause problems, they can break over your boat, especially if you go into them too fast, or you are too slow and a following sea catches you, but they do not drive you into the cliffs and onto the rocks. The wind does that and there is no wind, so I can keep in close to the cliffs, maybe five metres, and I can dodge in and out of the rocks. This close to the shore the waves are not so big. They break up as they rebound and meet the oncoming wave and create a choppy, lumpy, environment. Not dangerous, unless I make a mistake, but stressful and tiring and I have been up since four this morning.

I cannot believe I am doing this. Moving my beehive from the winter location, snug on a steep hill in the forest, to their own private valley by the sea in the north of Saria, the next island. There they will be ready for the blooming of thymari, the thyme, which, in two weeks will cover the mountains with a mauve wash and provide nectar and pol-len and enable my lovely, lovely bees to flourish and give me honey. I was in the trees before dawn and it was dark and I had to approach the hive without light. I did not want to disturb the bees and have them come pouring out as I closed their entrance. They guard the entrance valiantly against robbers in daylight. But they were asleep inside as I approached and I had no problems. They were quiet too as I carried the hive down the mountainside, loaded it onto a truck and drove it to the beach. There they rested while I drank tea and waited for dawn.
  

It is best to transport bees in the cool of the night, so they do not suffocate, but the way to Saria is rough and in the dark that can be difficult, so we wait for the light. Bees regulate the temperature of their hive. If it is too hot they stand by the entrance and by the mesh and whirl their wings to circulate air. Too cold and they block up the mesh and the cracks in the wood with propolis, a magic, sup-posed healthy element, secreted by special glands. They make honey by collecting nectar, mixing it with water, stor-ing it in the comb, whose cells slant slightly upwards to avoid drips. Then they cure the mixture, by maintaining the temperature precisely and evaporating off excess water. You and I make wine or beer in a similar way. We read books about it, we learn from our friends. But a bee?   This tiny, furry creature. How does she know, for it’s the females who do the work? How does she know what the tempera-ture is and what to do about it? When the honey is ready, they cap it with wax, secreted by another gland, so that they can store it for the winter. As it happens, capping the comb means that I can transport full combs home without spilling any. We work together my bees and I.

As the sky grew lighter in the east I returned to the beach. I look through the mesh again. All is quiet; the workers are calm and deep inside, the queen is at ease. I have been taught to respect the queen. I do not call her mana, or mum, as the locals do. I am a beginner. A subject. To me she is E Vassilissa, the Queen. I loaded my twenty thousand passengers and the queen into my little boat and off we go in what looks to be a dead, calm sea. But not for long.
On my own I would turn back. It is too rough now, too difficult. I have to look in four directions at once, avoid this wave, slow down for that, wait behind this rock, then glide between those two small ones. And what’s it going to be like in Alona? But when we reach Alona it is dead calm, dead flat. Sheltered from the Sirocco, the south west sea, it causes me, for the first time ever, no problems at all. Around the Mediterranean, wherever they grew wheat or barley, you will find in the old historic countryside round flat stone constructions among the terraces and the olive groves by the sea. In Greece, in the villages, they are called Alona. This is where they took advantage of the summer wind, the Meltemi, shaking the grain from the sheaf, break-ing it a little then throwing the mixture up in the air so that the wind can separate the wheat from the chaff. If you have seen this you are lucky. If you read about it, then, no doubt, you will have been told it is biblical. It is not. They were doing this long before the bible became the confused oral history of tribes of nomads and farmers. So I cross the bay of Alona, away from the cliffs, away from the rocks. And Steno too is calm. The narrow, normally wild passage that separates Karpathos from Saria is benign today, the sea oily and flat like yoghurt.
 

I chug up the east coast of Saria as fast as I dare. The sun is climbing, the day warmer now. I don’t want my bees dis-tressed. They are by the mesh now in their hundreds, wings whirling, facing the breeze, keeping the hive cool, keeping alive. Me too. Still alive. Where are those rocks outside Palatia? There. OK. Wide berth and we are at Alimounda, the summer residence. I anchor the boat, tie up on the beach, carry my little darlings two hundred metres inland. I place the hive in its spot, sheltered from the wind and the afternoon sun, and provide them with a little runway; for they like to land a few centimetres from the entrance to the hive and wait before walking in the entrance.

It is hot. I am tired. I rest for ten minutes. I put on my gloves, my beekeeper’s mask and jacket. I light the smoker. It is the smell of smoke that enables us to work bees. They think there is a forest fire coming and they start to gorge on their honey, ready to transport it to a place of safety. I open the entrance, smoke it a little with the smoker and wait. Nothing. They do not come pouring out, an angry, danger-ous, mass of high pitched buzzing. I have done my job properly. They are not frightened, they are calm. I walk away and sit quietly. A little while and a few bees come out to search for water, pollen and nectar. When they return they will perform a dance, a circle or figure of eight in front of the entrance to show the others what they have found and how far away and in what direction. They will be happy. Her majesty will be happy. Here there is plenty. I have done my job. Now they can do theirs.

TO LIVE IN GREECE is to be blessed; blessed by light, blessed by mauve mountains washed by fresh thyme in the early summer and blessed by a cool breeze in the early evening as you lie on warm stones by the sea and listen to children playing. To live in Greece is to understand history; to live daily with catharsis, tragedy, pathos and comedy. It is to be blessed and it is to be cursed; cursed by stubborn people, cursed by lies, delays, unexplained disappearances, unexpected arrivals. To live in Greece is to be cursed by oppressive heat and by the knowledge that the soil is soaked in blood. Greece is not confined by its boundaries; everyone who looks Greek, thinks Greek or speaks Greek is Greek. There are Greeks in Afghanistan and Mozambique, Australia and America. And yet when asked the people do not tell you they come from Greece. They say they come from this village or that island. Greece does not exist and yet it is everywhere.

To live in my village is to know secret corners; places I can visit, places no better, nor worse than anywhere else in the world, but little corners that distil my history and my feelings for life. Balconies, where I can sit as night falls and listen to soft voices from the village people as the sea grows black and the sky turns a unique blue before it too darkens and the stars spread themselves around. I can hear owls; the Little owl that appeared on drachma coins in Athens 2500 years ago and Scops owl with its sharp notes; call return, call return, call return. There are windows here where I can sit and watch the church tower achieve its white silhouette against the night sky. There is a room where I lie at night and listen to the fishing boats come and go. That’s Sortiris now, going north, and Costas too. Later it is Iannis with his overpowered outboard, or Karellas with an engine as clapped out as he is, in a boat kept together by thick, gaudy paint. In the morning I hear Michaelis with his dogs, his ninety yearold mother and his wife going to Saria. They will stay there for a week or two and they like fresh milk so they take goats with them in the boat.

I could lie in bed all day and know the village from its sounds. In the morning there are cockerels, in the evening the sound of goats and sheep and all day dogs bark and children play. Then there are the voices of the women, their own private language low with chuckles and laughter round the oven as they bake bread, strong as they talk to a friend, or a sister, or a child further away. The tourist boat comes at its time and leaves with the flotsam and jetsam that is the European tourist trade; Danish, Dutch, German, Italian, a babble of barbarian voices and hysterical laughter. Now and then the ferry boat arrives, chains tumbling to the sea as the anchor seeks purchase against our strong winds. I hear the winds too. They play with my shutters; Trasmontana, Sirocco, Meltemi, Maestros. These names are ancient and Venetian; they remind us of what we were and tell us something of what we are. And then there is the sea, never silent, never still, the waves washing the stones in rhythms in the summer or pounding rocks when winter comes.

So this is Greece and this is my village. I want to introduce you to some of the people here and explain a little about our life. A fishing village in Greece is the dream of urban people everywhere, supposedly timeless and unchanged, as if these were desirable qualities.

Maybe such places exist, but only in the barren dreams of people made impotent by the thirst for money, youth and success. We are not like that here. Maybe we are unique, but I feel that we are real,that we have found something about the possibility of living in harmony with a difficult landscape in a difficult world.

I have tried to portray our community as it comes to terms with change and deals with the burden of history. Wherever possible I have tried to allow the people to speak for themselves. If there are mistakes in style, or in substance, then the mistakes are mine, for I am restricted in technique and running out of time.

The visitors’ perception of our village is limited. To them it is always hot and always sunny. The smarter ones recognise that it is nearly always windy too, but not much more. Those of us that live here have to be more observant. We have to travel by boat so we care if the wind is north or northwest, or even north northwest. We know it is often calmer in the morning than in the afternoon when the weather comes from the south and that, when it is from the north, there is often a lull around dusk. We inform our neighbours and ask for advice before we set off on a long journey by sea. We do this because our weather can change in half an hour and we know that if something goes wrong then someone from the village will look for us if they know where to look.

In the winter, if we are lucky, it will rain. If we are very lucky it will rain early and several times. Then we say that the rains are useful and we know that our crops will grow and there will be green across the island throughout the year. Two crops are particularly affected by rain: wheat and olives. In many years the winter rains are so poor that nobody plants wheat at all. A whole cycle of traditions are held in abeyance; the ploughing, the sowing, the reaping and the separating of the wheat from the chaff. Of course, the flour made from our own wheat and ground in our own windmills makes the bread baked in our ovens that much tastier.

Each of the stages of growing and harvesting, processing and baking is accompanied by its own traditions, with its own songs and words. Many of these words and traditions are known only to the women and it is always with great pleasure that we see young girls learning from their mother, grandmother and sometimes, sitting in the shade of the oven, learning from their great grandmother too. Good winter rains bring us good harvests and at the same time our culture and our knowledge of the old ways springs up from the soil anew. If it rains in late October or early November we are especially pleased because the rain cleans the olives before we pick them and that makes life easier. Our olives are small and bitter, but they make fine olive oil and we produce soap too. Some olive trees have their own names. We know when they were planted and we know which of our forebears planted them and we talk to them as we pass by. When we had the big fire and the pine forests and olive groves burnt, we had problems with women who went into the fields clinging to loved trees that were doomed. We had to drag them screaming and weeping back to the village. We did not lose any women, but we did lose many olive trees. Over the years we have planted them again. A sign of renewal and hope and a wish for subsidies from the European Union.

Through the winter we are fearful of the Sirocco, the south wind that can do so much damage to our boats and even to the houses in the village. Many times we have sat in the cafe watching a storm when a big wave has come over the mole, over the beach and the road and dumped water, sand, stones and muck right among us. We lift up our feet as the water swirls under the benches and tables and then it subsides and Anna comes, waving her broom and shouting at us for being so stupid and at the sea for being so evil. It doesn’t take long to brush away the stones and at least the toilets get cleaned. Winter here can be cold; not every day, but for days on end. Our houses are cold too. Not many of the new ones have chimneys and concrete is not as good an insulator as limestone or slate. When the sun shines the women sit outside and the men fight in the cafeneion for the next sunny spot, otherwise doors are closed and the village too. Much work is done in the winter; building, carpentry and farming too, but there are not so many of us here to do the work. Much of the village is empty, as our children go to school, or to university, and their families follow them to the south of the island or to Rhodes or Piraeus, or maybe to the United States. Grand parents and great grand parents follow too and visit hospitals and old friends in far away places. I have never been to Baltimore, but it must be strange to the people there that Greek restaurants open in the winter and close in the summer so that their owners and their families can come here to swim and fish and have fun.

Springtime can be the best season. The sun starts to warm our backs in the fields as early as February and within a few weeks our fields and mountains are filled with flowers; green leaves appear and herbs as well. There are red poppies and white neragoula and narcissi too and those of us who walk in the forests marvel at the tiny bee orchid, its flowers mimicking the bumblebee to attract pollinators. Migrant birds appear; the small passerines, beeeaters and rollers, hoopoes and birds of prey. From the cliff tops it is possible to see eagles pass by; beating a passage over the sea, heading north against the wind, flying close to the waves to give them lift.

Booted eagles, short toed eagles, golden eagles come to join our resident Bonelli’s. We see black kites and longlegged buzzards and once, huge and beautiful, an eagle owl heading north to the Russian steppes. Cuckoos pass by and swallows, swifts, alpine and pallid, and then we wait for the first tourists. These always catch us by surprise. The rooms have not been cleaned since October, the sheets are not washed, we have only half painted the house and of course the rubbish brought by the winter storms has not been cleared from the beach. But we are glad to see tourists; they bring laughter and fun and sit in our cafe and our restaurants and we renew old friendships and start new ones. Springtime is a season of change for us.

By mid May the last Sirocco has ceased to blow and the summer wind, the Meltemi, is blowing strong from the north. The artichokes are ripe by now and the beehives double in population every week or two. But it can be hot, far too hot. So we work in the early morning, when the sun is not strong and the tourists still asleep and the women bake bread at five in the morning and their low voices mix with wood smoke as we sleep on roofs and balconies.

The summer wind is always from the north and it never rains, but you will not see us working in the fields. There is some activity however on the mountains around Avlona or in Saria, as bee hives are moved to catch the thyme as it blooms. A good season will bring reward and in this part of the island more than ten tonnes of honey is produced and tourists can buy the real thing rather than the cheaper varieties imported from Crete, or Denmark, or China. In the cafeneion Anna will advise on the coolest place to sit and where to catch a cooling breeze. But by August there is no room for any of us in the cafeneion as the village is full of visitors; Italians and French and Germans too, as well as our own people returned from exile. So the hotels are full and most of the houses are occupied and doors and windows that have been closed for months, or even years, are open once again. Lights are on at night all over the village and there is a smell of mothballs and sun tan lotion. Guitars are played on the beach until the early morning and it could be anywhere but here. So the people, who come for something unique, find only something recognisable all over the world a holiday atmosphere. Perhaps they are satisfied.

No matter, this time passes quickly and by the middle of September the crowds have gone and the restaurant owners are pleased to see you and we can go diving without being followed by a flotilla of Italians hoping for us to lead them to the big fish. And now there are kingfishers, a pair on each bay, speeding back and forth exactly half a metre above the sea. They sit on rocks and dive, neatly to seize atherinos, the little fish that cling to our shores in late summer. Where kingfishers come from and where they go I do not know. I have asked ornithologists and they cannot tell me. I have never seen a nest, but I think they breed here, late, in the rocks and in the cliffs. Soon they are gone too and the passerines pass by at night, hunted and harried by Eleanora’s falcons as they hug the coast heading for Africa. The swallows head south in late September and October and then the eagles and falcons arrive in Saria and seek ever more powerful thermals. They go higher and higher until they can see the weather to Crete and even Africa and then they are gone. Herons and egrets stay for a while, then one late evening, or on a bright night, we see the silhouettes of skeins of birds going south and summer is gone.

We are back to autumn again and peace in the village, but the olives need to be picked and crops planted and there are ripe figs to be gathered and so much fruit. We need to fish to fill the freezers, for the winter storms will come again from the south and deprive us of sea bream and silver bream and red and grey mullet, palamida and tuna. And of course we must fix that room and paint the house to be ready for next season.

As for me, the time I like best is the onset of winter. Sometimes, when the rains come, it is still warm enough to sit on my balcony at night, in the dark and listen to the drops singing on the roofs outside and smell the freshness of the pine forest, a glass of whisky in my hand and a head full of memories. Or it can be cold and windy and then it’s time to go to Anna’s and squeeze through the door and sit inside and watch the men playing cards, or tavli. An ouzo is called for now and I listen to the shouts of the men and the storm outside and watch moisture trickle down a windowpane. Then I know that I am really in the first chapter of a fine novel by Kazantzakis and I am glad.