The Monk Seal Conspiracy
‘So be it, stranger; I will tell you all without deceit. When the sun in its course has reached mid-sky, the sage old sea-god leaves his ocean – the west wind blows then, and the ruffled water is dark enough to hide him. Once ashore, he lies down to sleep under the arching caves, and around him is a throng of seals, the brood of the lovely child of Ocean; they too have come up through the grey waters, and they too lie down to sleep, smelling of the deep brine below. First he will pass along all the seals and count them; then, having viewed them and made his reckoning, he will lie down among them all like a shepherd among his flock of sheep.’
~ Homer, The Odyssey ~
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The island of Samos, showing the project’s three proposed biogenetic reserve areas including Seitani, declared ‘Strictly Protected’ in March 1980
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1. The Break-In
It was a drizzling winter night on Samos, 30 January 1979. Accompanied by my friend and colleague from Berne, Rita Emch, I drove home along the rough and winding coast road to the fishing village of Ayios Konstantinos. We hardly spoke. Both of us were exhausted after a nine-hour voyage from Rhodes following several days of tedious meetings in Athens. The silence seemed almost hypnotic at times, magnified by the overwhelming blackness of the night. We passed the graveyard at Kokkari, with its small shrine full of bones, and on the marble headstones, candles casting a watery and eerie glare upon the photographs of the dead.
Under the feeble beam of the car’s headlamps, some stretches of the road would suddenly turn into moonscapes of bone-jarring potholes and craters. The sea was muffled and listless, and no stars or moon were visible through the leaden sky. The twinkling lights of Hios and villages on the coast of Asia had also succumbed to the gloom. Even the mountains had disappeared, swallowed by the island’s sombre and brooding winter soul. The villages we passed through had wrapped themselves up for the night, the houses huddled together against the dampness, and only a few lighted windows, scattered about, were still glowing with warmth. Samos was hibernating, turning inward as Aegean islands still do in winter time, as though cut off from the rest of the world by a cold and unfriendly sea.
About half an hour later we parked the car in Ayios and, bleary-eyed, walked up to the two small houses which we had managed to rent at the heights of the village. Along the stone pathway the lamps flickered with a frail and almost ghostly countenance. It meanders its way up between old houses with sagging whitewashed walls, red-tiled roofs and rickety wooden balconies. Under the squinting and watery eyes of the lamps, the sleepy village was deserted. Some people were already curled up in their beds, others were probably sitting around a stove or open fire, drinking sage tea and brandy. The air was saturated with mist and wood smoke. There was a profound and almost expectant silence in the night, amplified by the hollow, echoing drops from the naked branches of the trees. As the pathway reached the summit of the village we said good night, just outside the old church with its skeleton bell-tower, illuminated by the last lamp of the village. Enveloped by the darkness, I walked the last few yards to my own small house, nestled against the hillside among the tall cypress trees, close to a mountain torrent.
Perhaps instinctively, I sensed that something was terribly wrong. I fumbled for my matches and it was in the first flare of their light that I realized the door had been wrenched open. As they burnt down to my fingers, I nervously struck more matches into life and moved cautiously into the house. Almost paralysed by my own dismay, I found the rooms ransacked and the windows smashed. At first, the sputtering flames of the matches alarmed me, throwing magnified and distorted shadows across the room. My heart leapt as they flickered across the whitewashed walls, the overturned furniture and my belongings strewn across the floor, somehow too sinister, too menacing to be mere shadows. But whoever had been here had already gone. I reached behind the door to switch on the electricity at the mains. I then turned on the light and the ransacked house fell into a different, sharper perspective. It was at that moment that I realized what the victims of burglaries mean when they talk about their lives being ‘mugged’ or ‘raped’. A home, after all, gradually comes to reflect the characters and souls of those who live within its four walls. To lose a few possessions, even cherished ones, is nothing compared to the harrowing feeling that one’s life too has suffered a brutal invasion. After the first fear begins to subside, the paralysing heartbeats which thunder in one’s ears and temples become hollow and empty, the atmosphere frigid, bruised and filthy.
Up in her own house, Rita sat perched on the edge of her bed, hugging herself in the chilled air, her eyes impassive, her lips curling with resentment. The house had been little more than a farmer’s storehouse or kalivi before she moved in, filled with hay, earth and dust. It had taken days of single-minded effort, clad in overalls and scarf, to transform it into a home – whitewashing the walls, painting the doors and windows the blue of the islands, and then adding simple decorations like dried flowers, weavings, home-made batiks and traditional Samos rugs and pottery. The warm and fluid light of an oil lamp seemed to cast a peculiar light over the scene, the wrecked room and her belongings scattered about her like a pile of rubbish.
On closer inspection, however, it became quite evident that this was no ordinary housebreaking or burglary – despite the obviously frantic and haphazard disguise. Whoever had ransacked the houses must have been under orders to mount a systematic search for some kind of incriminating evidence against us – there was no other plausible explanation. But the result, perhaps due to nothing more than bungling and incompetence, was truly bizarre, an uncanny blend of sheer vandalism and diligent investigation. The perpetrators had rummaged their way through letters, working notes, slides and project documents, all of which were now either missing or scattered about the floor. A film had been torn off it’s spool inside a camera and two other unprocessed films of monk seal habitat in the west of the island had disappeared. Even personal letters had been taken and those that remained had obviously been meticulously examined. Incredibly, several different documents and letters were now stapled together, and each of us was startled to find some of our belongings in the other’s house, as though the ‘burglars’ had been going back and forth, carrying articles of obscure yet evidently fascinating interest to them. Even two rice-paper ink drawings from Nepal were now clipped together as if they had inspired great curiosity or suspicion. Candlewax had been dripped over almost everything, as though the thieves had forgotten their torches and were too alarmed by their covert activities to switch on the lights. With similar absurdity their fumbling and inquisitive fingers had also examined packets of batik dye, and their prints were now smeared across almost everything they had touched.
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