The Monk Seal Conspiracy

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6. The Cradle, The Grave

In the meantime, our efforts to save the monk seal were no longer taking place in the blue and breezy Aegean sea, but in the rumbling and smoggy streets of Athens. As we shuttled back and forth like demented yo-yos, this seemed perversely incongruous, and yet we could hardly deny that for the looming extinction of the monk seal, the city harboured a cryptic and monumental significance. Indeed, the fate of Athens itself was inextricably intertwined with the fate of the Aegean sea and the seal itself. Its bureaucracy was as voracious as a black hole, gorging itself on the precious delicacies of time, patience, fortitude and sanity. Mind-boggling knots of red tape would entangle everything and everyone that came within its reach. It was perhaps the ultimate threat to the monk seal, and perhaps the only ‘mortality factor’ never to appear in a scientific treatise on the conservation of the species.

Nor was this stultifying bureaucracy only confined to government. In one way or another the same infuriating hindrances and nonchalance seemed to pervade almost every aspect of society in the city. Even the simplest task could take hours, days or even weeks. Because most offices were closed during the traditional afternoon siesta, every appointment had to be carefully scheduled in the five hours between eight and one. This usually entailed mad dashes across the city by taxi, only to be swallowed by some immense traffic jam, still miles away from our destination. Finally arriving for the appointment and already streaked with exhaustion and sweat, our rattled nerves would then be confronted by the infamous doormen of Athens, usually officious pensioners of rather bleak intelligence and prone to entirely arbitrary judgements, whose only responsibility, so it seemed, was either to prevent or to delay one as long as possible from entering the inner sanctums of officialdom.

At times it seemed like the most ingenious and impenetrable obstacle course imaginable, but the hurdles were just as high in the arts, compounded by idiosyncrasy and viciously competing egos. One group of musicians had promised us a benefit concert for the monk seal, but as soon as all the arrangements had been made, a member of the band announced that the Maoist communist party to which she belonged had voiced strenuous objections. Apparently the party’s hierarchy would first have to check with Beijing to ascertain whether the monk seal was of any interest to the struggle of the urban proletariat. Evidently it wasn’t, since the entire venture ultimately collapsed.

The individual bureaucrat could be imperious and exasperatingly evasive. Not only his office but his very existence would be smothered with papers, as though the final objective of government amounted to little more than cutting down forests and storing them in filing cabinets. His desk would invariably be sporting an impressive rack of rubber stamps, which in Greece seemed to confer upon any sheet of paper an aura of solemn and unequivocal authority. At first, whenever we presented any of our own documents for consideration, they would be regarded with suspicion and disdain. This persisted for weeks until we also had several different stamps made to adorn papers with our own brand of officious credibility. It worked wonders.

As we shuttled hectically between Samos and Athens, it was like traversing the borders of a morbid split personality. It was almost as though Athens was the rampant and seething brain of the country, and the islands and villages its inner and ailing soul. Indeed, Greece had become so centralized that the city itself and not merely its bureaucracy had taken on the uncanny likeness of a black hole, sucking resources and people towards its cavernous jaws and consuming them to feed its own inexorable growth. The village and the city had become two starkly diametric worlds. Trees and clean air are not the only victims of this urban cancer, but also the traditional culture of the people, their once close-knit communities uprooted and dispersed across the city into anonymous high-rise flats. Sometimes the disease was even more glaringly apparent: a tiny Byzantine church now dwarfed under the massive concrete pillars of a steel and concrete government building; old houses with red-tiled roofs concealed within the Potemkin facade of a modern office block as though they had insulted and embarrassed the modern image of the city.

This haunting impression of a split personality was not merely confined to the distinct landscapes of the two worlds, but to the values of the people as well, as though neither could actually relate to the other’s sense of reality. For the Athenians, Samos was a distant and provincial outpost which consequently bore the stigma of inferiority. To many of the intrepid Samians who visited the city, on the other hand, some of whom had not even ventured out of their own villages for years, Athens with its crumbling infrastructure was a bewildering maze of bureaucratic complications, daunting in its massive anonymity, where the pace of life reached an almost unbearable tempo.

Like many megacities the world over, Athens has become its own lucid yet unheeded oracle of ecological decay. Its grip over the nation is an imperialism of both chemical and cultural pollution. As undisputed leader of the country, it carves out a common, fundamental destiny and even the smallest village is obliged to tag along behind it.

‘On the brink of disaster.’ This was how the newspapers of Athens were describing the city’s crisis in 1979. Even the nominally tame and tendentious government reports on the issue warned that rampant urbanization, overcrowding and pollution could eventually make the capital of Greece uninhabitable. The ‘glorious city’, as it was known more than two thousand years ago, was literally suffocating in its own effluent, trapped under an ominous layer of pollution known as ‘the black cloud’. As urgent smog alerts were broadcast, some citizens were compelled to wear respirators, and pedestrians, in a battle of wills against the rumbling and chaotic traffic, could often be seen with moistened handkerchiefs stuffed to their mouths and noses.

Nor is the decay of Athens confined within its city limits. Raw sewage and untreated industrial waste is discharged into the Aegean, endangering marine life and posing a serious health hazard to humans. Down at Pireus, the industrial port city of Athens, doctors warned that because of the dispersal of toxic chemicals, mothers were in danger of ‘giving birth to monsters’.

Exacerbating its already critical problems, Athens was expected to double its population by the year 2,000, growing into a megacity of nearly seven million people. Greece has one of the highest urbanization rates in the world, and almost a third of the nation’s entire population is now crammed into the city. This urban malignancy has an insidious bearing upon even the smallest villages of Greece, where Athens remains an undiminished beacon of opportunity for those disillusioned with the poverty and tedium of rural life. As the city continues to expand, absorbing 50,000 newcomers from rural areas every year, the villages themselves are becoming extinct.

Symbolizing the ‘cradle of civilization’, even the Acropolis, the crown of modem Athens and Greece’s focal point of national pride and identity, is now being devoured by acid rain. But perhaps it is because the fate of such ancient monuments inspires a far greater concern than the dying Earth and dying seas that this cultural patriotism seems so resoundingly hollow. After all, while the monk seal is left to die, the creature is displayed with pride in a meticulously preserved 2000-year-old mosaic honouring the beauty and wisdom of the sea.

Even this is not the rancid hypocrisy that it seems, but merely the rampant illness of our times; our schizophrenia. In the disintegrating confusion of the disease, the heritage of a nation is almost exclusively confined to archaeological or artistic treasures, as though the past is easier to save than the present. The same syndrome impels 20th-century Athens to defy and insult even the greatest philosophers of ancient Greece while glorifying them in name. The teachings of Pythagoras and Plato, for instance, encouraged veneration for the Earth as a sentient being ‘endowed with soul and reason’, almost as though they were the visionary forefathers of today’s ecology. Etched even onto the decaying marble stones of the Parthenon itself, for example, is a cryptic religious tribute to the oracle of the goddess Gaia, the mother Earth – a bitter reminder of the belief that civilization was once born innately from the womb of the Earth and was nurtured by those who worshipped it.

Here, the pathos of history could almost resemble an ancient Greek tragedy, with the city’s doting forefathers nursing a rather awesome prodigy of ideas and visions within the cradle of civilization. But as the fleeting years passed by, they can hardly have dared realize that their precious child was becoming obsessed with greed and conquest, and would eventually murder their own god, the mother Earth.

Looking up at that world-famous monument, perched high above the urban sprawl, one can’t help wondering whether its symbolism might have been corrupted by blind patriotism over the centuries, and whether, instead of being the beacon of a glorious heritage, it has now become an insistent but unheeded omen, the discoloured marble bones of a fallen civilization, a latter-day oracle to a megacity careering towards a fate which might eventually see the ‘cradle’ become the deathbed and the grave.

Within fifty minutes of escaping Athens we were soaring over the sea of Icarus and over the humpbacked island of Ikaria, the mythological remains of the impetuous youth who flew too close to the sun. With the wax of his wings melting, the legend then saw him plummet down into the Aegean to become that strange, eerie and wind-torn island.

It was a gusting, windy day, the plane like an insignificant toy in the unpredictable draughts and air pockets around the mountains of Samos. Tilting this way and that to keep its approach on course, curving down over the green hills and silver-grey olive groves, the flight finally culminated in a frightful jolt and kangaroo landing at the airport, the Olympic Airways jet shuddering in agony down the last few feet of runway with its engines screaming, the passengers eventually applauding the pilot with a distinctly ironic blend of relief and admiration.

Back in Kokkari, 8 April was designated ‘Beach Cleaning Day’. With the mayor and many of the village’s younger inhabitants, we all joined in the gruelling effort, picking over the pebbled shores like some strange breed of scavenger that feeds off the waste of civilization. There were heavy deposits of oil, and great lumps of sticky, congealed tar. It is a plague that is getting worse year after year, defiling even the most remote and pristine shores. Civilization persists in using the sea as a vast rubbish dump and the sea, as if patiently trying to wean us from our folly, returns as much as it can to the shore.

Plastic, that most pervasive and insidious of consumer goods, was littered everywhere – bits of old fishing nets, the inevitable plastic bags handed out to every customer at every shop and supermarket, old toys, and the broken corpse of a child’s doll lying amongst the flotsam and debris, as though an omen for both humans and sea. We carted away over thirty sacks full of paper, cans, bottles and broken glass, plastic and tar - all in the inevitable plastic rubbish bags of course.

This plastic is not just an indestructible eyesore, it is also an unseen and ruthless killer, and an ecological problem of immense proportions. Every day, the world’s merchant shipping fleet dumps more than 450,000 plastic containers into the sea, not to mention over 4 million metal cans and 300,000 bottles. Commercial fishing fleets either lose or dump more than 150,000 tons of plastic every year, including nets, lines and buoys. In the North Pacific alone, more than 2,500 kilometres of netting is lost each year, and these ‘ghost nets’ then drift through the sea, killing indefinitely. Around the world, at least 2 million sea birds and more than 100,000 marine mammals die annually after becoming trapped in plastic sheets and nets. In the Mediterranean, 30 per cent of all fish have balls of plastic in their digestive tracts. In 1984, an ailing sperm whale was washed ashore on the Adriatic coast and was found to have over fifty plastic bags stuffed into its throat. Sea-turtles mistake plastic bags for jellyfish which then become lodged in their stomachs, eventually causing them to starve. Seals die in slow agony with straps of plastic entwined around their throats, and birds die of hunger when bands of plastic get clamped around their beaks.

I had the sneaking suspicion that the only reason the residents of Kokkari had for cleaning the beaches was the oncoming tourist season and fears that the lucrative holiday-makers would be driven away by the rubbish. Nevertheless, perhaps a profound ecological lesson was struck home in the minds of some people a week later, when a spring storm washed ashore yet more of the cast-offs of a ‘disposable’ civilization, more plastic, more oil and more tar.

Beach Cleaning Day in Kokkari, Samos, April 1979.

The highest point of the village is its ancient heart, which seems to touch the deep blue zenith of the sky. Old men and women, with crooked gold teeth and wrinkled, berry-like faces, sit up here in the evenings, placidly looking out across the village that is in their blood, filled with the sound of the sea and the wind through the trees. A stone-slab pathway dips away towards the sea that is just visible, emerald blue and menthol green at the shore, between the houses leaning over towards each other, some of their balconies almost touching, the profuse and rambling bougainvillea cascading vividly from the stone walls. You can also see the fishermen’s cove where the large winter caiques are shored and secured by steel cables and winches. You can see the red roofs of the village faded pale by sunlight, the houses huddled together across the terraced slopes. Down below, they scatter, dispersing more easily along the small coastal plain, the village petering out along a wide sweeping bay of many-coloured pebbles, towards the foothills where there are a few isolated kalivis, chapels and small farms, often concealed amongst the tall cypress trees. You can see the terraced vineyards and the fields of wheat and corn, numerous vegetable plots irrigated with water channelled in ancient aqueducts from the mountain streams. The foothills become higher, dip away again and then climb until they become the faces of the mountain chain, bluish shadows falling across them, the peaks of the second range glancing through the chasms of the first.

As the fishermen moor their boats at the platea, reflections flicker across the blue and yellow hulls and the shoreline, curving away, is lapped by the clarity of morning.

Women sprinkle water over the street to damp down the dust and cool the air. The barber opens his shop and the rising sun is golden as it floods through the windows and silhouettes the top-heavy outline of the house. Calm and serene, for the village there are no brutal ultimatums of time. Around us the houses glow and swallows fly about the roof-tops. Under the green trellised vines old men with worry-beads in their hands close their eyes with soft shadows falling across their faces and let their minds swim and drift into a new day. At the sea’s edge, the fishermen begin to lay out their yellow corked nets to dry in the sun, grumbling to themselves about the holes they’ll have to mend. Across the way, a street hawker leaves the platea, his baskets empty, his news and gossip from other villages told to everyone who wanted to hear. Resonantly he calls out his wares, and people look out from their upstairs windows, they come to their porch steps with small children following them, half-dressed. He weighs out his vegetables and fruits on some old bronze scales while his mule stamps the ground impatiently. The swallows fly miraculously through the narrow streets and soar above the heights of the village. Above our heads, the long mirror of the caféneon tilts the houses and makes them look even taller and closer together. We all look around between ourselves and our reflections.

But these are memories from the spring and early summer, and sometimes, it seems, from a bygone age. The tourist invasion had not yet begun, and only appearances and illusions of hope belied the sad fact that Kokkari had already sold its soul to prosperity.

From rags to riches, the Seashell, like so many other villages of its kind which once hovered on the brink of the Third World, is coming in from the cold. And at what price? The brutal and erratic advent of progress: money, selfishness and bad taste become a domineering force, and Reality a pollution as insidious as plastic and chemicals. The vestiges of an ancient balance, wisdom and dignity are all but lost. It is the city that begins to dictate desires, the blind leading the blind, the new and hideous urbanized landscape establishing itself with a vengeance. The concrete box hotels, nightclubs, boutiques and discotheques, fast-food stalls and souvenir junk shops. The stone pathways ripped up and replaced with concrete, as the local craftsmen become obsolete and as endangered as the seals. From one extreme to the other – of course, no rainbow is born. From a poverty which was once at least dignified, to the intoxication of glamour, luxury, superficial glitter, snobbery and success, the push and shove of the rat race betraying the once cherished traditions of harmony and diversity, sudden wealth flaunted with the typically bizarre and offensive manners of the new rich. Greek immigrants returning from Australia and America with their savings, opening bars called ‘Hawaii’ or ‘Acapulco Sun’. The children and grandchildren of fishermen now work in restaurants, hotels and nightclubs, or have gone to the big city to seek their fortunes – partly because there are hardly any fish left in the sea. Those fishermen that remain supplement their meagre incomes by turning their boats into taxis to shunt tourists back and forth. The centuries-old traditions and customs are crumbling – without any kind of defence against the influx because those customs were all too strict and intransigent, just too narrow-minded to be able to evolve towards a balancing, creative alternative. The village becomes a holiday city, inundated with noise and vulgarity, the ugly competition for trade, short tempers at the height of the season, envy and back-biting.

The people are perhaps poorer than they ever were before, gaining only to lose. Squatting in their village colony, there are the razor-sharp entrepreneurs from Athens who haul their profits back to the city at the end of the season. While the old people hide in their houses at the heights of the invasion, the speculators say in defiant justification of their investments, ‘Things must change.’ And change they have. The fields exhausted and sprayed with ever greater concentrations of chemicals to squeeze out ever greater and more rewarding crops, the chemicals washing down with the rain to poison the sea, and the beaches defiled with rubbish.

Now even the barber in the platea would have to move out. He’d been there as long as he could remember, his father too, but the rent had got too high for him and a cheap and tasteless souvenir shop was destined to take his place.

All within a few years, you could see a village dying, as though consumed by some disfiguring disease. It was already a far cry from how I had known the village a few years before on my first visit to Samos. The travellers who came here then were now too poor for Kokkari’s taste. Many of them used to sleep in the open air or take cheap rooms in pensions. They didn’t eat three meals a day or buy those garish trinkets and souvenirs made in factories in Athens and sold all over the Aegean as traditional handicrafts. In short, they didn’t consume enough. They were gradually driven away to more remote and enticing villages by hordes of tourists of the package-tour variety, conveniently slotting in their two-week vacations in one of the new and comfortable hotels that began to sprout over the village, replaced as soon as they had left by another load arriving by air-conditioned coach, as if on a conveyor belt.

It is here, more than anywhere, that one can perceive city-civilization’s all-pervasive grip, the relentlessness of its expansion, the malignancy of its Reality polluting further and further every year. It is as though the villages are faced with a devil’s alternative. They must either die a slow death, or conform to a degrading commercialism which will kill the harmony and peace of mind of their community.

Yet even at the height of the season, we would always be welcomed back to the village by those who had become our friends, those who had begun to realize for themselves that the Seashell was embracing only the paradoxical ruins of prosperity. Often it would be like a homecoming, and we would cherish this. At Manos’s caféneon with its walls bearing photographs of Gandhi and Einstein, we would be given a glass of sweet wine or ouzo, pistachio nuts and cheese pie. The barber would come over to drink with us, and he’d sit against a reflection of the moving sea and a coastline in a pane of glass. Manos and his wife would go bustling about their chores. You could perceive a subliminal irritability and fatigue in their words and gestures, their faces furrowed with strain. The sleepy tourists would soon wake up and gradually the platea would be swamped with them, all demanding breakfast, drinks, rooms and a million other trivial yet irritating things. There’s no time to talk, only a passing word and a smile here and there, and perhaps a distant longing for autumn, the winter and early spring when his cafe will be full of people he knows – calm, inward-looking days, a stove burning in there, the rain and blustery weather outside, the stormy sea, trusted people helping themselves to drinks, playing backgammon and cards, indulging in lively and histrionic discussions, the platea once again becoming the hub of village life.

How long can the village tolerate this kind of schizophrenia, torn between two realities? One side always seems to be at the other’s throat, and here they are, unwittingly caught in the middle. Who could have known that in the wake of the first travellers – often open and sincere people whom you invited into your houses in trust and friendship – would come hordes of anonymous city tourists with a callous and deafening indifference for your village and your lives, that original and idealistic symbiosis of lands and cultures debased to a duplicitous selfishness, a business, a decadent cosmopolitan playground, traditional hospitality vanished, corrupted by resentment?

Further along the coast, an old stone pathway snakes its way up to the mountain village of Vourliotes. You pass by waterfalls and over little wooden bridges. You come to tall poplar trees and a derelict watermill. Across the stream and a tree-trunk bridge there’s what looks like a poor Byzantine chapel with a lop-sided door. Down below, past the poplars, the sea fills the horizon. You can see the small shrine on the sugarloaf hilltop near Avlakia and below, fields and stone houses scattering back from the beaches to the ghost village of Gambos and the bamboo-fringed coast road running towards Platanakia and Ayios.

Up through narrow medieval streets, weaving their way under archways, over bridges and through tunnels formed by streets or houses above. Past the fourno or bakery, and in the early twilight the old baker will be there, his face streaming sweat as he removes the freshly-baked loaves from the wood-fired oven, with its patterned ceramic tiles and single cast-iron door. Here, confined and musty, a cobbler’s workshop with a mountain of odd and assorted shoes piled high in a comer. The shelves are stacked with large boxes and a young child, hiding in one of them, peeks out mischievously. A dim electric light bulb hangs down from the yellowing ceiling, and in his leather apron the ‘shoe-doctor’ sits beside his cluttered working bench, hammering nails into the soles of shoes and stitching leather, straining his eyes to get more light from the open door and the dusty, grimy window.

The baker, the tailor, the carpenter, the stonemason, the blacksmith, the weaver, the bronze-smith, the miller, the herbalist, the village musician. Many have fallen by the wayside, and those that remain have been struggling for years. It’s how the mountain villages die from the inside out. Even the yoghurt makers have been put out of business, this time by EEC bureaucrats in Brussels, ostensibly because their tiny shops did not conform to the same hygiene standards as the vast stainless steel factories in Athens.

Vourliotes too is only a shadow of its former self. Today, only farming keeps this mountain settlement alive, and the villagers can be thankful for small mercies, that the island is still green enough, the soil still rich enough to support them. Other mountain villages, thousands of them all over Greece, have not been so fortunate, and only old people now live amongst their crumbling ruins, waiting to die. There are no entrepreneurs poised to build tourist hotels, souvenir shops, nightclubs and snack bars. After all, what use is a tourist village without the sea? And yet the pressures of centralization and mass production, the enticements of high technology and big business are still there. Humiliating their unworldliness, seducing their naively with bounteous mirages, the city vacuums in the village children to become a part of its greater ambitions of conquest. Get rich quick. But who can blame them when the village elders themselves are stubborn against change, when the atmosphere of the village is stifling with coercion and boredom, and when there is no ingenuity, no imagination, no alternative but the beckoning city? Often it is the culture’s own introversion, its remoteness from the flow of time and events, its pitiful lack of insight which betrays its own self. Under these immense pressures, what hope can local crafts such as carpet-weaving and earthenware pottery have? The city with its mass production and mass consumption has made them all but obsolete, irrelevant.

Life in such villages was never a pastoral dream. Existence was often fraught with hardships, especially during the damp and cold winter months, and many villages hovered on the edge of malnutrition for years. But today, the mountain villages have become little more than slaves of the city, no longer evolving in their own right but serving Reality’s soulless gigantism. Farming lurches from its primitive organic beginnings to the intensive exploitation of the land with chemical pesticides and fertilizers. As the young are enticed to the city, there is less labour available for the farms and the chemicals provide an easy solution. It’s a vicious circle: chemical warfare is waged across the land, the pesticides killing wildlife indiscriminately, the farmer’s pests but also his friends, those natural predators which help to sustain the land’s innate ecological balance. Pesticides are inhaled by farm workers, often causing chronic illness, they sink into the ground water and remain as poisonous residues on food transported to the market. Meanwhile, the more recent v end prodigious achievements in biodynamic farming are deliberately eclipsed and vilified by the raw propaganda power of the world’s giant chemical corporations. While there are vast food mountains in the industrialized world which eventually have to be destroyed or sold off at a loss, while governments are beginning to beg farmers to produce less food, the chemical corporations still piously maintain that we need these poisons to increase yields and to prevent mass starvation, caring nothing for the long-term health of the Earth but only for their own profits. It has led to the deathly silent spring all over the industrialized world, but you can sell chemicals so much more easily than education. And people’s memories are short, they soon forget about the absence of birdsong, wildflowers and the intoxicating fragrances of the spring.

The village craftsmen were once part of a greater ecology which gave the communities their integrity and balance with the natural world. But as the craftsmen grow old and die, so do their crafts and so do the villages themselves. The path of destruction doesn’t even stop there. As the villages die, so do the islands. And as the cities and industries expand, the rivers and seas begin to die. This is absolute ecology, the ecology of connection, cause and effect, but like most aspects of the Unseen War, the connections are rarely perceived. Take dynamite and chlorine fishing, a war against the sea’s already ailing fishing grounds, which can endanger the livelihoods of entire communities. In the Aegean, it has been discovered that the culprits are often farmers who have been displaced from their smallholdings by industrial, mechanized agriculture. Poverty-stricken, they then resort to part-time dynamite fishing, since it requires little capital outlay or fishing skill.

Little streets and pathways stoop and climb between the leaning, top-heavy houses, their timbers gnarled and warped by time. A poor woman washes clothes at a street tap. Girls do tapestries, cook and light woodstoves. Little boys on simple errands, a note sometimes tied to their wrists. But we’re strangers here, of course. We pass through like ghosts on the peripheries of their lives.

Now along a dust track to the monastery of Vrondiani to see the rare treasures of the little cloister church, surrounded by great fortified walls and within these walls, around the chapel, trees in heavy blossom. Vrondiani, the Madonna of the Thunders, looks out towards the east and the distant mountains of Anatolia. It’s surrounded by pine, poplar, platanos and chestnut trees, and in the deepest forest, streams echo with the migrant breeze and the hypnotic rustling of an ocean of leaves. Suddenly a siren begins to wail from the woodlands outside Vrondiani. And from the cloisters, commandos come rushing down, clutching rifles, machine-guns, tin hats and gas masks. They clatter down the stone steps, across the courtyard and through the heavy gates, rushing towards their camouflaged bunkers. They take little notice of us. At the small gateway to the cloisters, just above a wooden crucifix, a sign reads: ‘Military Restricted Area. Entry Forbidden’.

With slow agony, the monastery reclaims its silence, pacifying the livid ghosts of the mountain saints.

On our way back to Kokkari, we walk through the mountain range, wind-torn and silent. Two goatherds call us down from below on pastures made green by the rains. They are probably inhabitants of one of the small and impoverished mountain farms scattered beyond the reaches of civilization. They wave to us and shout and their dogs run towards us, barking, but they whistle them away and we greet each other warmly and sit down and smoke. They ask where we’re bound for and they tell us of the pathway ahead. They mention the ruined castle, Kastro, as a bearing for our journey to Kokkari. The blue gusts buffet us with crystal sunshine and slowly we drift into a grateful and intuitive silence. The old goatherd here and his grandson have no use for news of the modern world. They know quite well that the world down below is mad. The eyes of people, the grandfather says, sighing, they tell me all I need to know of these wicked times. Wicked world. And he says no more, only a deep glance comes from the boy, almond-shaped eyes, long tousled hair, fourteen years old. He feels the city’s calling, almost irresistible between fear and adventure, and the grandfather sees it and shakes his head remorsefully. He knows the boy is slowly learning to belittle the mountain and what he says, but he can’t hold the boy here, he can’t stop him from leaving the mountain or even dissuade him with words, hearsay against hearsay. He’s always lived up here, mountains, goats and spirits of timelessness.

Out of his leather satchel the old man takes goat’s cheese, raisins, bread and milk, and we eat amongst the foraging sheep and goats and the panting watchful dogs, and look down mountainsides of broken stones to the sea far below, to little chapels built in the most precarious places and to the sky which has become ominous with light racing clouds.

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