The Monk Seal Conspiracy
18. Franz Weber’s Monk Seal Island
For the rest of July we were able to retire from the almost permanent stress of battling bureaucracy and avoiding arrest. Our aim now was to concentrate on establishing a monk seal sanctuary in the northern Sporades islands, far away from the tension of the eastern Aegean.
After the belching smog of Athens, the Sporades archipelago seemed like an entirely different world. As we landed on Alonissos at the small port town of Patitiri, I wondered whether we would finally catch a glimpse of the shy and reclusive monk seal. Although the outlying islands are thought to harbour one of their strongest colonies, with up to thirty seals living around the secluded coastlines of Kyra Panaya, Yura, Psathura and Piperi, sighting one of the animals would still be a rare experience. The weather was also against us. By now the summer meltemi had arrived, its capricious soul sometimes caressing the islands with a gentle breeze and sometimes gusting at them, their shores buffeted by spray and stormy waves. Though the meltemi brings a briskness and clarity to the islands in July, to inexperienced seafarers like ourselves it can also prove treacherous.
Waiting for the students to arrive from Athens, we spent the first few days testing the Zodiac’s seaworthiness and making ready camera equipment and other supplies for our expedition. We also roamed the island on foot, and once again it became apparent to me how each island possesses, like a soul, its own unique charms and idiosyncrasies. After all the trials and tribulations of the spying saga, these summery islands were steeped in a mellifluous serenity. The cloudless skies were a profound blue, the sea shimmering, its waves breaking over the rocky shores in the sheer exhilaration of being alive. Snatching a moment of utter tranquillity from our hectic lives, the islands seemed to impart a fleeting glimpse of an ancient bond between humanity and Earth, a message borne by the limpid intensity of their coves and maquis slopes, their stone villages, their silver-grey olive groves resounding with the ratchet-like song of the cicadas, the grapes ripening on the vines, the air permeated with the scent of pine and aromatic herbs.
As soon as the students arrived, looking distinctly queasy after a stormy voyage from Volos, we moved into the small house we had rented dubbed with faint satire ‘Franz Weber’s Monk Seal Observation Station’. Work then began in earnest, preparing the leaflets, posters and questionnaires, planning interviews and making last-minute arrangements for the expedition.
At this time of year Alonissos begins to absorb an overspill of holiday-makers from the neighbouring and more touristic islands of Skiathos and Skopelos. Its small pensions and tavernas still seem quite startled by the summer’s ritual invasion, uncertain whether their sudden brisk trade is a windfall or a menace. Some probably realize that the island is being pushed to move with the times: the shrivelled old peasant women dressed in black, the aged fishermen whose wrinkled and weather-beaten faces resemble a parchment map of the sea, its currents and islands. They watch the confusion with distant serenity, still steeped in the innocence and isolation of a bygone era.
Disillusioned by what they perceive as an increasingly insecure profession, some of the younger fishermen have now resorted to ferrying tourists to secluded beaches in their boats, and even offer visits to the prospective marine park, an ominous threat to the seal refuge. Although no one seriously proposes to inhibit Alonissos’s increasingly lucrative tourist trade, there are those who seek to guide it towards a more reciprocal relationship with a unique local culture and a fragile environment. An unchecked tourist inundation would spell disaster not only for the monk seal colony but also for other endangered species to be found in the area, such as Eleonora’s falcon and Audouin’s gull. It is here that nature and the traditional way of life on the islands merge their interests and their shared risks of survival. If the sanctuary succeeds in protecting and reviving the monk seal colony, there is a chance that the creatures might regain their trusting and frolicsome nature, and once again become a friend to humans. But it will take a great deal of imagination to deter the local population from the same pitfalls which have desolated so many other Greek holiday resorts. For Alonissos, the impatient temptations of short-term economic gain would not only prove injurious to its culture and environment, but also deprive the local people of a unique and sustainable livelihood. With the marine park as its focal point, it would be possible to create a viable and long-term economic plan which could become exemplary for its harmonious balance between the interests of humans and wildlife.
At that time, however, little progress was actually being made to establish the sanctuary. Like Seitani, the marine park was still awaiting its Presidential Decree, with no signs that this was imminent. Apparently the proposal was still bogged down in an inter-ministerial dispute about which section of the government should be responsible for the park. According to John Burton, executive secretary of the London-based Fauna and Flora Preservation Society (FFPS), the status of the marine park was ‘as it was ten years ago’, a pessimistic appraisal, but one that typifies the frustrations of having to contend with the Kafkaesque bureaucracy in Athens.
I had not dared tell Franz and Judith Weber about a ‘rival’ conservation group in the Sporades, even though the FFPS had no comprehensive and long-term commitment to the islands and no permanent on-site representative. Jealousy would undoubtedly have raised its ugly head again, probably jeopardizing our entire programme. Yet together with the German zoologist and film-maker Dr Thomas Schultze-Westrum, the FFPS had been instrumental in efforts to protect the monk seal colony. The fishermen had become disillusioned and cynical about the government’s empty promises, so frustrated by the bureaucratic quicksand in Athens that they held the monk seal colony to ransom, threatening to kill the creatures unless they received adequate compensation for their damaged nets. But the government remained impassive and aloof, and the seals were only given a last-minute reprieve when the FFSS stepped in and donated a cold store to the fishermen for preserving their catch; previously, ice had to be imported all the way from Volos at great cost. A colourful plaque outside the Fishermen’s Co-operative, depicting fishing caiques and seals, commemorated this new-found co-operation between conservationists and the fisherfolk of the island. But the government, which would have to take over responsibility for long-term compensation of the fishermen, was still dragging its feet.
According to Dr Schultze-Westrum, who originally proposed the idea of the marine park in 1976, the fishermen’s long-tried patience was again becoming exhausted by government apathy towards the threats to their livelihood. Although many of the fishermen still had some sympathy for the plight of the seals, they were angered by the continuing invasion of their fishing grounds by commercial ‘Gri-Gri’ trawlers from Salonika and other mainland ports. ‘Gri-Gri’ is a commercially intensive form of fishing, using brilliant phosphorescent lights to attract fish into nets laid by several trawlers in a large circle. It is notorious for its indiscriminate scouring of the sea, and its highly destructive effect upon the sea’s fish-breeding coastal areas. Although pressure finally prompted the government to issue a temporary one-year ban on the trawlers, the fishermen still complained that an almost total lack of enforcement was resulting in the habitual flouting of these regulations. They regard the trawlers as the greatest threat to their livelihood and complained that the exploitation of the once rich fishing grounds had already led to the disappearance of two species of fish.
The price of this human greed in overfishing the seas has become glaringly apparent in the restaurants and tavernas of Alonissos, where fish is often more expensive than any other kind of meal, including beef imported from Argentina.
Over a hundred families rely on traditional fishing on Alonissos, and it could be described as the economic mainstay of the island. Despite this, the fishermen are genuinely afraid that theirs has become a dying way of life. But although the marine park had become a contentious issue, most of the fishermen we talked with were convinced that the protection it could bring to their fishing grounds might save their livelihoods from eventual collapse.
Kostas Kaloyannis, an older fisherman who owns the caique St Dimitrious, told us: ‘We see seals almost every time we go fishing. Seals are quite common in this area but they do a lot of damage to our nets. When I buy a new net I don’t know how many days it will last. It may be destroyed in a single night by a seal or a dolphin. We agree that it’s necessary to protect the seals because they’re a rare species, but on the other hand, fishing is our livelihood. We don’t want to do any harm to the seals any more. In older times we used to make shoes from them, but we don’t wear those kind of shoes any more.’ The younger fishermen however are not so tolerant. ‘I hate the seals!’ one of them growled at us as he repaired his nets. ‘Look here – this net is full of holes made by seals. They take the bread out of the mouths of our children and then you come here and tell us not to kill them! Do you want us to starve?’
None of the fishermen could understand why traditional fishing was being allowed to die while the commercial trawlers were receiving fat government subsidies to exhaust the sea. They complained that though the lamp strength legally permitted for the Gri-Gri trawlers had been reduced to 800 watts, a bureaucratic blunder in drafting the law meant that the gloating Gri-Gri fishermen had merely added more lamps to their trawlers.
‘There is no government protection at all,’ said one fisherman, echoing a familiar complaint against the authorities. ‘Those officials, sitting behind their desks in Athens, they don’t know anything about the sea. The Gri-Gris take all of the fish when they have their eggs inside them and kill all of the young fish too. Every night they take about three tons of fish and most of them are thrown back dead into the sea because they’re too small to sell.’
‘The sea must be kept in balance,’ an elderly fisherman told us. ‘The more creatures there are, the more steady the balance. But the Gri-Gri trawlers are upsetting the sea. Some twenty years ago I used to catch about 200 kilos of fish but now I’m lucky if I get 30 kilos.’
Illegal dynamite fishing is another issue which infuriates the fishermen. Theophilos Efstathiou, an elderly fisherman from Kalamakia who owns the caique Two Friends, explained the situation with almost lyrical simplicity: ‘I believe the seals should live because they are creatures of God. They are not to blame for what is happening to the sea. Let me put it this way: fifty years ago there were ten times as many fish in the sea and ten times as many seals. And if dynamite fishing is not stopped before it’s too late, then in ten years time there won’t be any fish left in the sea.’
In Votsi, a fishing village not far from the main settlement of Patitiri, lobster fisherman Costas Karoutsou mused about the seal’s audacious nature, remarking that the creatures ‘have very refined tastes; they only eat the best and most expensive fish, leaving the head and bones on the net.’ He was also more specific about the threat of dynamite fishing, alleging that the culprits were difficult to apprehend because they were protected by dishonest officials bribed with generous amounts of highest-quality fish. ‘If a government official came to check on the fifteen restaurants from Marpounta to Steni Vala, he would find dynamited fish in thirteen of them,’ he asserted, and went on to explain that the flesh of dynamited fish is made bloody by the great shock of the explosion. But couldn’t enforcement by the port police halt dynamite fishing? He snorted sarcastically and remarked that the Alonissos port authorities ‘don’t even have a boat, and you can hear the patrol boat from Volos when it’s still more than an hour away.’
Only a few months earlier, he told us, he had found a dead seal in his nets, and agreed that entrapment could be one of the biggest killers of the species. ‘A seal would probably die in the net even if I pulled the net up on the same day,’ he said. ‘Not only because it might not be able to breathe, but because – and the same goes for dolphins too – the moment the animal realizes it’s captured and has lost its freedom, it will die.’ But what can be done to save the sea? He shook his head sadly. ‘By now there are so many problems that one doesn’t know where to begin. Man has turned the sea into a brothel.’
A young boy who had been listening to our conversation told us that a few years ago, he and his father had brought a seal pup into Votsi and had ‘tied it up like a dog in the sea’. He said that the animal had died within a few days, and he laughed, as though the seal was not even a living being capable of feeling and emotion. But as we continued our discussions with the fishermen, the boy began to listen attentively, and later told us that he wanted to talk seriously to his father about the seals. One of the elderly fishermen then told us, while glancing at the boy, ‘I think it is a very good idea to protect these animals. We older fishermen still know them – but what about our children, what will they be able to see? Hardly anything any more. So many animals and plants are disappearing. It’s a pity we can’t speak to the seals – if they could understand our language we could tell them: "Wait, I’ll give you the fish you need to eat, you don’t have to attack my nets"…’
Back in Patitiri, the fishermen looked sceptically at the Zodiac as though trying to calculate our chances of resuming alive from Piperi. It was then that fisherman Nikos Flouros, owner of the Fearless, a white caique with a dove-shaped wind vane at the head of its mast, invited us to accompany him to the outlying islands and we gratefully accepted the offer. The following day he approached us with a troubled expression, as though something had been preying on his mind. Almost furtively, and with a profound sense of shame, he told us that some fishermen on Alonissos still detested the seals and sometimes killed them by baiting a fish with a needle which they then threw to the animal as it approached their nets. ‘They must die in terrible pain,’ he said, shaking his head as if to dispel the dreadful image from his mind.
A few days later, after stowing away our provisions, we set out on our expedition to the outlying islands of Kyra Panaya, Yura, Psathura and Piperi, with Nikos and his usual fishing companion, Costas, as our guides. Accompanying us on the two caiques were Nikos’s daughter and son-in-law, and Costas’s two sons, both of whom expect to follow in their father’s footsteps and become fishermen. As the two caiques moved serenely out of Patitiri bay, their white and orange-red hulls seemed to become even more pronounced, set against the deep Aegean blueness and the dry and rocky maquis slopes of Alonissos and Peristera. The meltemi swept the sky into a sparkling clarity of light only found in the Aegean, and the sea was exuberant with small cresting waves. Finally we were on our way to the seal refuge and a necklace of lonely islands scattered towards the north-east.
Several hours later we approached the shores of Kyra Panaya. Also known as Pelagos, the island is owned by the legendary monastic communities of Mount Athos, a hundred kilometres to the north. Mooring in the wide gulf of Ayios Petros on the south-west side of the island, we then made our way on foot to the small farm whose tenants’ main occupation is to make cheese for those distant monasteries, since the laws of the holy mountain prohibit even the presence of female animals. Life is calm and dignified here. There is none of the stressful competition with time which haunts more ‘civilized’ places; no tourists, no television and only a crackling old radio. The grandfather of the family, over seventy years old, proudly guided us around the farm; here a flock of goats waiting to be milked, here a wine and olive press, over there the casks of salty white cheese which caiques bring to the holy mountain. He then took a profound pleasure in playing us some traditional melodies on an old instrument which seemed to be related to the zither. Once again we were able to savour the precious but rapidly vanishing traditions of Greek hospitality: a warm welcome for an unexpected guest, a glass of retsina or ouzo, and a small plate of mezes – olives, a little cheese and bread – as these simple hors d’oeuvres are known throughout Greece.
Continuing on our journey, we sailed around the east coast of the island, and moored in a small bay close to the monastery of Kyra Panaya. Only one elderly monk now lives in the rambling 11th century monastery, which he administers on behalf of his superiors on Mount Athos. But the grey hair and lean, ascetic features belie an almost youthful agility and a quiet, ironic humour perhaps imparted by his isolation from the human world. Passing fishermen or those stranded by stormy weather respect his dignified yet good-natured companionship, his spiritual yet down-to-earth wisdom. He eyed our cameras with wariness and adamantly declined to be photographed – perhaps only because he was improperly dressed, wearing an old Micky Mouse T-shirt to do his chores around the monastery grounds.
An ancient tranquillity seems to cradle the monastery in paradoxical timelessness. One can almost perceive the presence of unchanged centuries in the silence of the small cloister church with its precious icons, beeswax candles and incense, and the rickety wooden balconies, workshops and stores warped and sagging from age.
We then headed towards Yura, a wild, uninhabited and somewhat desolate island of mountainous crags and precipitous rocky slopes where only an endemic species of chamois is said to roam. We anchored for the night in a rocky inlet and in the late afternoon surveyed the coast using the Zodiac. After nightfall we made our way back to the anchorage in the darkness, the wake of our boat and the turbulence caused by the motor churning up the plankton and creating vivid fluorescent streaks. Later, we must have looked like seals ourselves, huddled into our sleeping bags on a small sandy shore, and above us, in the clarity of the night, a sky emblazoned with stars.
A flat, volcanic islet, Psathura lies at the northernmost point of the archipelago. To approaching seafarers it must seem almost invisible since it hardly rises more than ten metres out of the sea. Submerged ruins are all that remain of the ancient town of Alonissos which once stood here. The only human inhabitants are the two men and their families who work at the impressive and beautifully crafted lighthouse which towers above this tiny planet lost in a seemingly endless sea. The lighthouse keepers told us that they hadn’t seen any seals around the island for a year or more, when a mother and pup could be seen quite frequently, swimming around the entrance to a nearby cave or loafing on the soft beige sand of the islet’s southern shore. Our explorations seemed to confirm this. We walked over the island from shore to shore, its salty scrubland and sand dunes where wild rabbit and hare are said to abound, and along the sand-ribbed shoreline where the fragrant and graceful sand lily still grows undisturbed.
By mid-morning we had reached the precipitous, brittle and cave-riddled cliffs of Piperi. As the caiques moored at Ikonastasiou, we made our first survey from the Zodiac, and sighted a large black seal with grey belly spots at an almost inaccessible cave close to the anchorage, sleeping soundly on a small stone beach.
In the translucent light of dusk, the sky became flecked with numerous Eleonora’s falcons, the air resounding with their piercing hunting cry. Piperi possesses a wild and rugged beauty: its sheer cliffs, its strange and gigantic rock formations, one like the stern and omniscient face of some prehistoric god, another like the battlements of some mythical castle. But walking up from Ikonastasiou, there’s the greenness and almost virginal serenity of the island’s pine forest. No humans live here any more, and the only trace of human presence are the cups used to collect resin from the trees to make retsina, the old monastery with its marvellously crafted stone roof in the shape of a cupola, two or three empty houses, and a stray donkey who seemed as surprised to see us as we were to see him. But suddenly pop music was blaring out from down below. Angered, we made our way back down to Ikonastasiou, to discover that the patrol boat had arrived from Volos, and was channelling a radio station through its megaphone speakers. How sad and bizarre this human intrusion seemed, particularly as it arrived wearing the uniforms of officialdom vested with a responsibility to protect this island.
That evening, we helped the fishermen lay out their nets, and later tried to make camp on one of the island’s few narrow beaches. But as we were preparing an evening meal, something, probably cliff-nesting birds, caused an avalanche of stones and rocks to rain down on us. So alarming was it that we were forced to race out into the sea to escape being hit. One rock crashed down onto the Zodiac but luckily caused only minor damage to the wooden boards. We then decided it was too risky to remain there and returned to Ikonastasiou and the fishermen’s moorage, sleeping out on deck.
The following morning we helped Costas haul in his nets, hoping to catch a glimpse of a hungry seal, but we were unlucky. After plucking fish from the nets and sorting them by type and size, we continued our survey of the island’s shores and sighted two seals in a cave on the east coast. Gaining access through a narrow tunnel, with the swell of the sea scraping the Zodiac’s hull against the rocky walls, the cave opened up onto a gently sloping beach. There we saw the first seal, sleeping so soundly that we were able to approach it, and take photographs without it waking. Grey-brown in colour, of an advanced age, and about 2.5 metres in length, the seal was wounded on one flipper and the tail, probably from fishing gear.
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Nikos’ caique off Yura.
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So absorbed were we with being in such close proximity to this rare species that we didn’t notice at first another, much younger seal that was lying to the right of us, in the darkness. Grey in colour, about I.5 metres in length, the animal startled us by suddenly raising its smooth round head, its eyes large, brown and childlike, and in that fleeting moment, an expression which seemed to convey the entire history of its race, its frolicking playfulness, its innate and betrayed trust, its haunting fear of persecution. As if by instinct, the older, perhaps mother seal, woke up and there was a sudden and desperate panic to escape us. The two seals scrambled frantically off the beach and into the water, desperately trying to get past the Zodiac which was obstructing their way out, causing such a swell that the boat was flung against the rocky walls of the cave. The stupidity was ours alone, of course. Now we had become intruders, using the word ‘research’ as our alibi.
Later on in the afternoon, we heard that a Greek television crew was searching for seals near Ikonastasiou. It was an absurd spectacle as they endeavoured to obtain underwater shots of a stray seal, in the highly unlikely event that one might be passing. They were rowed to and fro outside the cave by a fisherman’s young son who wore an expression of dazed and slightly annoyed resignation, apparently no longer startled by the strange whims of city-dwellers. The cameraman’s expensive equipment was slung into a rusty old drum whose end was covered with a piece of glass, and the whole contraption then hung perilously over the side of the boat. At the same time, his assistant tried to hold the drum steady and to keep the cameraman’s head covered with a towel. They looked about to capsize at any moment, the cameraman issuing muffled but histrionic rowing instructions which his assistant passed on to their long-suffering oarsman.
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Costas’ caique off Kyra Panaya.
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Once again that evening Costas and Nikos’s daughter prepared a delicious meal from the fish they would be unable to sell – fish which are usually just thrown away because they are unable to satisfy the strictly classified demands of a finical modern market. One fish in particular had fine white flesh almost like chicken, but is totally unknown in the marketplace.
Sleeping on deck, I awoke in the middle of the night and thought I saw a bright and steady flare of light on the horizon. The next morning, we mentioned it to Nikos who nodded thoughtfully, and said that it might have been the lights of Gri-Gri trawlers. As we headed towards Kyra Panaya on our way back to Alonissos, his suspicions proved well-founded. Floating limply on the smooth surface of the sea, the trail of dead fish became thicker and thicker, fish unknown to the market, young fish and fry, fish which could have given fertility to an ailing sea, fish which could have fed the hungry. What a crime that around the world, at least 7 million tons of fish are wasted every year as a result of increased specialization in the fishing industry. And how devastatingly tragic that here in Greece, the monk seal has became the scapegoat for this exclusively human folly.
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