(Old steammachine at Milelia)
It is not
easy to quit smoking. Especially when living in a country where the authorities
have tried in vain to make public buildings and restaurants smoke free and
where the people are reputed to be the biggest smokers of Europe.
I suppose
this is understandable as tobacco is actually grown in Greece. Even on Lesvos
there were once tobacco fields, particularly around Kalloni. Nowadays it’s only
the olive groves and the sheep and goat meadows that form the agrarian
landscape, whilst in earlier times the fields were more varied. Along with
tobacco, pulses, cotton and wheat were grown in large scale, amongst the export
products were wine, figs and acorns (for the leather industry). And, to be
honest, until the beginning of the twentieth century many more people lived on
the island.
It is said
that the Italian family
Gattilusio, who reigned the island from 1354 to 1462 stimulated the export
of wine and olive oil. Presumably before the inhabitants of the island grew
those products only for their own usage. When the Turks took over the island
the commerce continued to grow on the island and by 1548 taxes had to be paid on
wheat, barley, beans, chickpeas and field-beans, sesame, flax and cotton, must
and wine, figs, mulberries and almonds, olives, olive oil, honey, pigs and
silk.
At the end
of the seventeenth century tobacco appeared in the Lesvorian fields, that’s about
one century after Christopher Columbus brought the tobacco plant back from
South America. It was the Indians in that faraway part of the world who had discovered
that smoke from the tobacco plant had pleasant effects and they started to use
it for their rituals. The Spanish used it as a cure for sleeping and in 1560 a
doctor who travelled through Portugal sent Catharine de Medici some tobacco
leaves as a cure for her headaches.
Tobacco
first was a medicine, but as soon they learned how to roll cigars with the
leaves, tobacco became a stimulant. However, it was cigarettes that made half
of the world addicted to tobacco. The very first cigarettes were rolled (and
smoked) by soldiers in the Crimean
War (1853 – 1856). Later, in America, a machine that rolled 200 cigarettes
a minute was invented and so it started: American soldiers got ammunition and
cigarettes to fight in the two World Wars and it was they who introduced
cigarettes all over the world.
And so the
Greeks started smoking too. And not a little bit! In old Greeks movies you rarely
see a hero or heroin without a cigarette in their hand or mouth. Just watch
Melina Mercouri in Never
on Sunday, and you really want to start smoking again.
There were
tobacco fields aplenty in Greece, producing different kinds of tobacco. But
strangely enough, when the cigarettes became so popular in the Fifties the
tobacco fields on Lesvos had became more or less empty. People had had enough
of the island: there was a crisis, people no longer wanted to work the fields
for no money and emigration became a must for many.
In 1913
there were 140.000 inhabitants counted on the island: then the economy was at
its zenith thanks to commerce with the East. In 1912 the island was freed from
the Turkish, but Mytilini continued to be a lively centre of international
commerce. It was only in 1922 when Greece lost the war with Turkey and the
Orient closed down to Greek commerce that Lesvos suddenly was in crisis. It
must have been chaos then because people left the island in large numbers, but
refugees filled the empty places up. In 1940, 135.000 people still lived on the
island. Trust in any recovery of industry however was then lost and the number
of inhabitants lowered rapidly until in 1981 they numbered only 88.000. In this
century the estimated number has been around 90.000, although last year another
exodus started due to the new crisis.
So, even
before the world finally decided that cigarettes were bad, the tobacco fields
of Lesvos had already been abandoned, along with the many other products that disappeared
from the export list. The island now mainly lives from the byproducts of sheep,
goats and olive trees. There is a small export of ouzo and the only new thing
is tourism, which is good for a small part of the income of Lesvos.
I wonder
where those entrepreneurs who made Lesvos rich have gone. Around 1900 the
island was so prosperous that it invested big in steam machines: in 1888 12 steam
driven presses were responsible for 60% of the oil production, the remaining 40%
was produced by 190 regular presses. In 1908 113 steam driven olive presses
took care of 95% of the oil with 97 presses dealing with the remaining 5%. The
only investments nowadays are in solar panels and the windmills for green
energy. But I wonder how much profit the island will get from it. I saw that
the saltpans of Polichnitos were in production again. But who is going to
invest in seaweed or who is going to collect wool in order to export it as insolation
material for the building industry?
I would
like to have a small field with some tobacco plants. I guess that cigarettes
made from homegrown tobacco cannot be that dangerous to the health. But in
Greece there is this old and strange law that you are not allowed to smoke your
homegrown tobacco. So should I really quit smoking? Sigh.
(With thanks to Mary Staples)
@ Smitaki 2013
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