Smitaki

Mushrooms filled with Milk Thistle

2012-02-01T00:52:00.000-08:00

(Marlboro sea)

Real winter conquered the island some weeks ago. Mt Lepetimnos got sugared with snow for the third or fourth time, Agiasos was covered under a pretty thick layer of snow, as was Megalochori and other places in the Middle and West of the island and on an early morning the snow even visited Eftalou, a place not really known for such a white blanket. Now there’s a Siberian gale blowing over the island and I have heard somebody say that the wind chill is -10 °C, although the mercury only sits at 0 °C.

This morning I woke up to see that the sea was smoking. The first winter I spent on Lesvos and seeing this phenomenon – the ice-cold air above a still warm sea produces smoke above the water – I called it a ‘Marlboro Sea’. Because I didn’t speak Greek well enough to explain to my Greek neighbours that the sea was steaming, I told them that the sea smoked Marlboro cigarettes.

Whilst the sea lights another cigarette and I bundle myself up as if travelling to the North Pole (I still have to walk my dogs) the spring has opened up another offensive. And this is what I like so much about Greek winters: it is never only winter, it also is a little bit spring.

During the winter period the months were pretty dry and even now not enough rain has fallen to encourage the thirsty plants hiding under the ground to lift themselves out of the earth. Other years there were plenty of anemones around by now, but this winter there have been very few. Until last week, when serious rain wet the landscape and they came with abundance—the quite happy anemones, showing their pretty colours in the winter land.

Because of the drought there were only a few wild mushrooms in autumn and even the meadow mushrooms, which are not usually winter shy, barely appeared. Only after the rain of last week, did they spring out of the ground and I was able to pick a basketful.

The almond blossoms also don’t care for the cold. Some of them, quite courageous in view of the ice cold wind, have already opened their delicate pink petals. I do hope the tiny flower buds that they hide are frost resistant because the weather forecast predicts that in the coming days temperatures will go a lot below zero.

The icy winter landscape is perked up with the brightly coloured oranges, mandarins and lemons hanging in the trees, ready to be harvested. They will provide lots of vitamins C, a good protection for this long cold snap.

And then there’s the horta, the wild vegetables, that grow in abundance. Like the young nettles that are wonderful in an omelet. Last week I picked a horta, even more prickly than the nettles: the young leaves of the milk thistle.

Milk thistles are very healthy to eat: they are good against liver and gallbladder disease and they even seem to protect your liver when you consume too much booze.

The story goes that the white spots on their leaves are thanks to the Virgin Maria, who on her get-away from the Romans to protect baby Jesus, spilt her mother milk on the leaves of thistles.

Milk thistles in the summer can grow as high as two metres. Their leaves are pretty prickly; even their starting rosettes, from where their purple flowers (butterflies love them) will grow are already pretty prickly. It was no easy job to collect these milk thistles. But somehow you just learn how to collect them; although washing them was another dangerous job. As their rosettes lay nearly flat to the ground while you cut them there will always be some earth with it and they do need a good washing before you throw them in their hot bath to be cooked. Put on some gloves! On the internet I read a recipe that stated that you had to cut all prickles from the leaves. I think that would be a lot of work because those small rosettes have lots of leaves and those leaves have even more prickles. I certainly didn’t intend to cut all those prickles; collecting and washing them had already been a long enough job. I suspect that the writer of that recipe had never actually cooked thistles, because when the leaves are boiled, their prickles become soft and tender and glide smoothly down your throat.

So after the prickling preparations and the boiling, I removed the stems from some big champignons (the meadow mushrooms were too small to be filled), chopped the stems and fried them with diced onions and bacon. I fried the champignon caps until they shrank and removed them from the pan. I finely cut the thistles leaves, added them to the mushroom-bacon mix and seasoned it with some salt, pepper and thyme. With this mixture I filled the mushrooms: champignons filled with milk thistle! It is a nice side dish or a fine meze to go with a glass of ouzo and very good for people intending to hit the bottle.

So you see that a Greek winter does not offer only cold.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2012

Light Towers

2012-01-25T23:37:00.000-08:00

(The lighthouse of Molyvos)

For centuries pirates terrorized the Aegean. And it wasn’t just the sea that was not safe; these sea faring thieves regularly raided the islands. That’s why on Chios the mastic villages like Pyrgi, Mesta and Olympi were built as real forts with thick walls all around. And just like on Lesvos, they were not built at the seaside, but hidden inland so that they were not easy prey for the pirates.

On the east side of Lesvos, just outside of Mytilini, tower houses, or pyrgelia were built, where goods and cattle could be stored and families could have a safe haven there. Originally they were built as watchtowers. With a broad view over the sea they could warn the villagers when foreign ships came into sight.

By the Seventeenth century these pyrgelia became en vogue as houses: with a windowless first floor, but a large entrance that could be securely closed (some houses even had secret hiding places for the women and girls, in order to save them from a pirate raid) and an upper floor which served as the living space where the light flowed in through windows and with a characteristic wooden extension.

Those towers were not built everywhere. Elsewhere they lit fires on the mountaintops along the coast, as a warning of approaching pirates.
Maybe this old warning system can be considered as the precursor of the lighthouse.

One of the eldest and best-known lighthouses from history is the Pharos of Alexandria, built between 297 and 283 BC by Ptlomeus I Soter on the island of Pharos just in front of Alexandria. The town was conquered by Alexander the Great and Ptolemeus was one of his generals. When Alexander died, Ptolemeus proclaimed himself King of Egypt and started building the lighthouse, which became one of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World. It is said that the tower was 120 – 140 metres tall and that its light could be seen from 50 kilometres away! This was, for ancient times, an unusually tall building; however, it wasn’t resistant to the earthquakes of 926, 1303 and 1323 and after a Sixteenth century Egyptian Sultan built his palace on top of the remains of the tower, nothing is left to be seen of this legendary Greek tower.

Even elder is the Maiden or Leander Tower that can still be visited close to Istanbul, on a small island in the Bosporus. This one was built around 408 BC by an Athenian general. He built it as a watchtower in order to keep a close eye on the movements of the Persian fleet. The Maiden Tower was rebuilt several times and for centuries it served as a lighthouse. Today it’s a restaurant.

There is an ancient Greek myth about this tower: the story of Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite who lived in a tower in Sestos, a little town on the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli at the entrance of the Dardanelles. At the other side lived the boy Leander who fell in love with Hero and he swum across to her each night. Hero lit a candle so that he could find his way. Leander convinced Hero that she could lose her virginity without insulting Aphrodite; so they made love for a whole summer. Until one day when a big storm blew out Hero’s candle and Leander got lost at sea and drowned. Hero was so distraught that she threw herself from the tower.

Because the Dardanelles and the Bosporus are so close and similar, the ancient Greeks and Byzantines believed that the Maiden Tower was in fact the Leander Tower.

The Turks have another story. It’s about the daughter of a sultan and an oracle had predicted that she would die on her eighteenth birthday from a snakebite. Her father built a tower in the middle of the Bosporus, so that she was far away from the land and the snakes. On her eighteenth birthday, glad that the prediction could not happen, he sent her a huge basket with all kinds of exotic fruits. But amidst the fruit was hidden a viper and, of course, the prediction did come true.

Lighthouses were not built as watchtowers for pirates. In some cases they may even have been extinguished in order that the pirates and their ships would be smashed against the rocks and perish.

There was no need for the ‘lighthouses’ on Lesvos to be put out, because they were not as old and legendary as the lighthouses of Alexandria and Istanbul. The oldest tower is from 1947 and is on the islet Megalonisi (Nissiopi), outside the harbour of Sigri. In fact, it is the replacement of an old iron lighthouse of 19 metres, built in 1861 by a French company, during the Ottoman occupation and destroyed in the Second World War. On the cape (Akra) Korakas, close to Skala Sykaminia, there was a similar tower also built by the French (in 1863). Nowadays you can only see the house of the lighthouse keeper. The sea is now made secure by a modern kind of lighthouse, similar to the one that stands guard on the Cape of Molyvos. The five metre tall lighthouse of Agrelios, at the mouth of the Gulf of Gera, was built in 1930 and has more or less survived history. Mytilini even has two remaining lighthouses: the Fykiotrypa, just in front of the castle, where there once was another tower from 1863 and there is also one in the harbour of Mytilini.

During the Second World War most lighthouses in Greece were destroyed. Before the war there were 206 and after the war only 19 remained. During the Fifties they started to rebuild some of them, others were left to perish or replaced by light beacons. It is only on the island of Ios that a lighthouse has been turned into a museum. Nowadays there are 120 traditional lighthouses in Greece and one of them is the one in Sigri. One hopes that with the forthcoming opening of the Nissiopi to the public, the lighthouse will also attract visitors. And I can imagine that when the tourists tire of viewing all those petrified trees, they will be in need for a drink. So why not turn the lighthouse into a tavern? Finally the Leander Tower has turned into a famous restaurant.

(With thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2012

Island for rent!

2012-01-17T09:11:00.000-08:00

(The salt pans of Skala Polichnitos)

A lot of Greeks were angry after a member of the Parliament, Gerasimos Giakoumatos, suggested that in order to earn some money Greece should rent out his archaeological sites like the Acropolis. It is not such a bad idea when you think about it. Renting is not selling and when such a renter is a private society, the tourist would not risk that often to get confronted with a closed Acropolis, due to strikes of the government workers.

The icon of France, the Eiffel tower, for example is also exploited by a society (SETE: Société de la exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, so why they can do it in France and not in Greece? Do not think that in such a way all people can rent the Acropolis as a fabulous location for a birthday party. SETE for example has as goal that the Eiffel Tower should remain the number one attraction of Paris. Which means a lot of work. They not only maintain the tower and its site, they make sure that they have a good service for the tourists and whenever needed they renew or modernise the site for keeping the Eiffel tower a modern attraction so that Paris can keep counting on it as a major income. To keep the Eiffel Tower attractive they cooperate or organise themselves regularly exhibitions, concerts, festivals and other events.

When you see their costs and earnings in 2009 it is clear that everybody gets better from it: income: 65,7 millions euro; costs: 62,4 million euro, included 8,5 million euro to the city of Paris and 1,3 million euro for taxes to the state. Why is this such a bad idea for the Acropolis?

Imagine that such a society can rent the castle of Molyvos. A clever entrepreneur could besides the regular visits to the castle organise events in the evenings, something that the municipality of Lesvos could nearly afford last summer and I am sure next summer it will be even worse. The castle of Molyvos is a wonderful place for concerts, dance events and other cultural activities.

They could organise spectacular performances, like there used to be those surprising concerts of the French group Urban Sax, who may show up with as many as 200 saxophonists. They can play from all corners of the castle, even play their saxophones hanging on cables from the walls of the castle. They could even have the concert taken place partly in the harbour of Molyvos. Even a concert of the famous Dutch violist Andre Rieu, high above the medieval village of Molyvos could attract thousands of people.

This society can even enlarge his renting area. The SETE is also part of a much bigger company (Snelac) that runs tens of attraction parks like the French Disneyland in France. I do not suggest that Lesvos also should get a Disneyland, but when you use your fantasy you could bring a little bit more activity to the island in order to get more tourists.

They should not only rent the castle of Molyvos, but also the aqueduct of Moria where they could organise picnic-concerts or light shows.

They could rent Old Antissa, restore the ruins, make it a serious archaeological site and include a theme park like Jurassic Park. It is in that region (near Gavathas) that the bones were found from prehistoric animals.

They could rent the saltpans of Skala Polichnitos, open a salt museum and build besides a salt hotel with rooms of salt. When in Kemi (Finland) they can build a hotel out of snow, you should be able to do the same with salt.

They should rent waterfalls and caves and make them accessible to a bigger public. In the caves you can make exciting labyrinths and waterfall sites can be used for bungee jumping.

They should rent the Ypsilo monastery and turn it into a star watching hotel, with a huge stargazer and rooms with glass roofs so that you can fall asleep watching the stars.

They should rent Agiasos and turn it into an openair museum and course centre, having the inhabitants wearing the old costumes, give lessons not only in old handicrafts like wood carving and pottery but also in modern theatre (Agiasos is known for its theatre plays).

They should rent Plomari, restore all those tall buildings and make there a shipping museum. In ancient times Plomari used to live from building ships.

They should rent Mandamados and call it the cheese centre of the island, organising a weekly cheese market and making the cheese factories public. I mean, the Dutch cheese city of Alkmaar is a daily attraction for hundreds of visitors.

They should rent Kalloni and have it transformed into a real Dutch village. This is also very attractive; look at the Orange Country Resort in Antalya, Turkey or to Huis ten Bosch in Japan.

Well, this last suggestion is maybe a little over the top, but imagine that somebody would realise all these proposals. I would not really like Lesvos turned into one huge amusement Park. But the idea to rent out some archaeological sites to private societies is no bad idea. It will not only bring money for the municipalities, it will bring more jobs and tourists.

An example to keep on renewing can be found at the Natural History Museum of the Petrified Forest in Sigri. They decided that the island Nissiopi, in front of the harbour of Sigri and full of petrified trees, should be open to public. Next season they will have a glassbottom boat bringing the tourists there. And so you see, one of the tiniest villages of the island, so remote and yet so progressive.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2012

Winter Vegetables Blues

2012-01-11T07:47:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I think: I wish it would always be winter. It is the refreshing quietness on the island, the winter sun that’s warm but not hot, nature that is saturated with rain and is shining green, beautiful skies, that for change are not just bright blue but populated with stout clouds. And, yes, whenever there is a storm flying over the island - like last week, when there was a southern storm that blew everything away from our garden, ripped thick branches from the trees and who knows what damage elsewhere - for a change it is nice to sit cozy, dry and warm at the fireplace.

And what is also nice about the winter is the food. Except for some nutritious soups the Greek kitchen (or island kitchen) does not have real winterfood like the stews we know in the north. Just as in summer you order several dishes, only the vegetables are different: cabbages and beans, green salads (marouli), leek, beetroots, celery and spinach. There is a bigger choice of fresh fish (weather permitting) and you can be sure that the calamaria and shrimps are fresh, just like the shellfish. There are huge radishes, there are wild vegetables (horta) and lovely goat or lamb in the oven. And another benefit: no watermelon as a desert, but pieces of cake or halva, fresh oranges or apples.

The vegetables are served very simply: cauliflower, cabbage leaves, broccoli just cooked and seasoned with a little olive oil and some drops of lemon juice. And they taste super, because they are fresh from the fields.

You could say that in the winter you eat the real authentic Greek food. Because whilst tomatoes reign over the Greek kitchen in the summer, the tomato is in fact an intruder. It was only around the Sixteenth century that tomatoes were brought from South-America to Europe by the Spanish conquerors. First the plants were just for decorations, because it was believed that the tomatoes were poisonous, and only about one and a half century later, tomatoes were accepted as an edible vegetable. Aubergines that originate from Asia came also to Europe around the Sixteenth century. A century earlier it was Christopher Colombus who brought seeds of the courgette to Europe, but the courgette that we eat now was only cultivated in Italy in the last century. The cucumbers were a little earlier: Pliny the Elder, a Roman military, writer, naturalist and philosopher, who lived in the first century AD, wrote that the ancient Greeks already grew cucumbers. But the cucumber originally comes from India. It might have been Alexander the Great, who was not only a big conqueror but introduced lots of new products (like the chestnut) to Greece, who brought the cucumber to Europe.

But cabbage is said to come from the Mediterranean. Green cabbage, red cabbage, white cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower ¬— they all came from a wild cabbage plant that loved salted coasts and poor grounds. Did you know that broccoli and cauliflower are the flower buds of the plant? If you don’t harvest these vegetables you’ll see the stems growing and the flowers appearing from their buds.

Beetroots also come from the Mediterranean countries. They come from wild spinach (originally called Sea Beet), a horta you can still find nowadays. The Greeks not only eat the root, but also the leaves. And yes, you guessed it: the leaves have a spinach-like taste. The roots and leaves all served together with a garlic sauce (skordalia) are a delicious Greek dish and if you run out of spinach one day, the leaves of the beetroot is a good replacement.

Celery leaves have been found in the grave of the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamon (he died around 1323 BC). The ancient Greeks believed that celery came from the blood of Kadmilos, who was the father of the non-Hellenistic gods the Cabeiri who were originally worshipped in the islands of the North Aegean (Lemnos, Imbros, and Samothrace [and possibly Lesvos]). This cult later spread further afield to the island of Delos and according to Pausiana as far as Thebes on the mainland. The Cabeiri were an odd kind of gods, sometimes father and son, or mother and son, but their lives remain a mystery. According to one of the many Greek myths they may also have been the grandchildren of Hephaestus, a son of Zeus who was worshipped on Lemnos and was the god of technology, blacksmiths, craftsmen, fire and vulcanoes (his Roman name was indeed Vulcan).

So, if I may believe the ancient Greeks I do live in the home of the celery (Lemnos is the neighbouring island of Lesvos) and in the home area of beetroots and cabbages.

I like to experiment with food. I am even writing a cookbook with recipes that are Not Quite Greek, but are made from Greek ingredients (I also count the summer vegetables as Greek). Celery can be more than just a soup ingredient and can accompany more than just pork, cauliflowers and broccoli sometimes require some decoration, and beetroots sometimes can get fed up with just the garlic sauce.

Here is a foretaste for a dish from Just Not Greek:

Beet salad with marinated anchovy (gavros)
(side dish for 4 persons)

500 g beetroot
1 bay leaf
salt
1 tsp sugar
a dash of vinegar
100 g marinated anchovy (or salted herring)

For the seasoning:
1 tbsp mayonnaise
1 tbsp Greek yoghurt
1 tsp mustard
½ tsp dill weed
½ tsp thyme

Wash the beetroots, remove the leaves (leaving 1 cm of the stem) but do not remove the root. Put them in a pan with the bay leaf, salt, sugar and vinegar and add water until everything is covered. Cook for about 1/2 hour. When they are soft, cut the small root and peel them. Dice them into small pieces (about 1 – 1.5 cm). Put 4 of the anchovies aside and add the rest to the beetroots. Mix all ingredients for the sauce and add to the beetroot. Serve on a green salad and garnish each portion with an anchovy.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2012

Molyvos in the dark

2012-01-05T03:45:00.000-08:00

(colouring sky in Eftalou)

The beginning of a new year is not only marked by people’s new year’s resolutions and the fact that it is a new year on the calendar. In Nature’s way here in Europe it also means that the dark days are over: the sun starts climbing and the days are getting longer.

Greece however will politically still remain in its dark days. Take Molyvos for example; in the month of December this medieval village was very dark, because the municipality could not afford a single bulb for festivity lights, in contrast to the neighbouring village of Petra that belongs oddly enough to the same municipality. It is one year since Lesvos became one huge municipality. The streets were dark and only thanks to some cheerful lights from some residents would one knew that it was a month of festivities. Even the big nativity crèche that was placed for years on the parking lot on the lower road to the harbour has now been absent for two years. Will it cost too much money to get it out of its hiding place?

Yes, Molyvos is economizing. For example the castle lighting is turned off at midnight. Which is not too bad, because not many people roam the streets after that time: the village seems to be empty. But it’s a real shame that on New Years Eve at midnight the castle remained in the dark. Nor was there money for even a small New Years Eve celebration on the square in the village. The only lights in the darkness were some sparkling rockets welcoming 2012 in Turkey.

Of course there are plenty of rumours and one of them is that since Lesvos became one municipality - all the money stays in Mytilini. The capital of the island was indeed sparkling with Christmas lights in December. And even if the money finds a way out of town, it probably gets stuck on the new highway from Mytilini to Kalloni. For almost two years people have been wondering how this new road will look: while big parts seem to be ready, hundreds of signs keep on telling you to go alternately to the right or the left, as if you were taking your driving test. And by the time the signs become redundant, I bet they’ll start all over again building a new road because this one will be worn out.

And not only is the money divided differently over the former 13 municipalities of the island; the telephone company and various municipal offices have all retreated to the capital. All sub offices are closed: go to Mytilini when you need something! Which is not easy for those not living close to the big city. Travel time from the north or south of the island can easily be one to two hours (unless of course you are driving a Ferrari and want to show how fast you can go). So people living far away will lose half a day going to Mytilini and that is not even the worst part. Most of the officials here have no idea how to be civil to their customers nor how to stamp papers, to give licences or provide a social payment or anything else required from the municipality. The most popular sentence is: “Come back tomorrow!” (as if you live around the corner) and then you have to ask your other neighbour to drive you to the city. If you are not blessed with living in Mytilini, you had better give yourself plenty of time if you need any licences, or to make a payment or arrange internet and you must also have made sure to have taken a rapid course in ‘how not to attack an official’.

So it seems that the rest of the island has been shunted back to the middle ages and, as far as I know, it was only the people of Plomari who last year made some serious protests against this stupid reorganization of melting so many municipalities into one. You might know that in ancient times Lesvos was divided into different city-states and that Mytilini and Mythimna (Molyvos) were the worst of enemies. Well, we are getting back to that time.

But, enough of those dark times, because the sun keeps on shining and thanks to the sun we have the light. The ancient Greeks thought that light emanated from the people, that our eyes were giving the light. Only at about a thousand AD the Arabian scientist Al-Haytham thought the light came into our eyes through outside sources. His books were not well read in Europe and it took until the end of the seventeenth century before the German astrologer and mathematician Johannes Kepler could describe how the eyes actually worked.

And you do need eyes in Greece. The country of the gods is known for its beautiful light. When the French painter Marc Chagall was invited to illustrate the Lesviot novel Daphne and Chloe written by Longus, he travelled to Greece where he discovered a completely new range of colours thanks to the Greek light. And that light is not only here in the summer. In the winter days without a ray of sunshine are rare. Nearly each day the sun lets her light shine on the landscape. Because the sun is so low in winter it creates even more colours in the air and when there are clouds travelling through the sky it really is party time. Just imagine a near black sky where stout white clouds pass along, their edges coloured bright orange, or even purple. The sea is like a magic ball, changing its colours from blue to all kinds of grey and when the coloured clouds mirror themselves you find rainbow colours all over the water. Spectacular sunsets, like we have in the winter in the north so often, cannot be recalled to Mytilini, nor can they be put out to economise.

A very happy 2012

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2012

Happy 2012

2011-12-22T01:13:00.000-08:00

On Lesvos the traditional Christmas dish is pork meat with celery: very popular!

I wish you: A merry Christmas & a very happy 2012

Καλά Χριστούγεννα

& Καλή Χρονιά

Let’s get the olives done

2011-12-16T07:51:00.000-08:00

(Harvesting the olives: for old and young people)

Everybody on the island is busy picking the olives from the trees. This year the harvest has not been abundant because there was such little rain (and because of that not too many insects to spoil the fruit so the harvest is of good quality).

Each year I help friends with their harvest and after days of work my body feels totally broken. But even though it’s hard work, harvesting together with your friends can be fun. Especially when the days end with a communal dinner. This year it was also the beautiful warm weather that made it nice to help out: yesterday I could have picked the olives from the nets in my bikini, it was that warm in the sun.

Lesvos has millions of olive trees, but most of them are harvested by hand. In some fields they use those small trilling machines, a kind of vibrator, sticks with round flying plastic strokes– a marvellous toy for the men. But mostly getting the olives out of the trees is done with a long wooden stick that you use to bat the olives out of the trees, just like the ancient Greeks used to do.

In Morocco also they use wooden sticks to get the olives out of the tree. Looking at this little movie on YouTube The olive oil of Bhalil,
anyone who knows how to harvest will wonder why there are so few and such small nets under the trees. My experience is that when harvesting, you put as many nets as you can in a huge square around the trees, so that afterwards there is no need to creep around on the soil to pick all the olives that have fallen beyond the nets.

The movie shows a pretty old-fashioned olive press: with huge millstones, which here on Lesvos are only found in the museums; they make a paste out of the olives, which is spread on thin mats, which are stapled and then pressed for the oil. It is not so long ago that on Lesvos they were pressing the oil in the same way.

In America they have mobile olive presses. Those would be nice to have on the island: because the press drives to your field you are assured that the olives are pressed immediately (the quicker the harvested olives are pressed, the better the quality) and you do not have to haul all those heavy sacks full of olives to the press.

The human race likes to invent things to make life better and this is how a person made this harvestmachine – a multi vibrator. Although I ask myself if this is useful. Mostly it looks like this way the man can very happily and relaxed drive his tractor along the trees, while afterwards it’s the women who have to go into the nets and clean up his mess.

Than the fully automatic foldable, turned-upside-down umbrellas with built-in vibrators do a better job. You just embrace the tree and give it a tight hug and hoppa, on to the next tree. And women are no longer needed to pick up the spoiled olives.

It can be done even quicker if you use those monstrous machines, which drive right over the trees while at the same time picking the olives. I might be a little old fashioned, but I think this method has some minor flaws: The trees must be kept small and form long straight lines. This way you get a land full of olive hedges. Imagine if here on Lesvos they were to cut all those old and beautifully formed olive trees in order to plant rows of small trees? The landscape would be altered considerably. And harvesting would no longer be such a party: one person would just race over all those trees and finished. Gone would be the romantic harvest of the olives.

I do understand that this way you would get a bigger harvest, but what’s wrong with the olives of Lesvos, which are treasures – mostly harvested with pleasure and producing a high quality oil? I do hope that it will take some time before the wooden sticks and the nets are replaced by such all-in-one machines. Don’t forget that olives picked by hand give the best quality oil.

In Morocco donkeys still participate in the olive harvest. Here in Greece most of them have already been replaced by pick-ups. Donkeys here are even at risk of dying-out; but that is a story for another time. On YouTube you can see how they make the olive oil here on Lesvos: simply – but with care.

(With thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Candy and Marzipan

2011-12-08T07:49:00.000-08:00

(Christmas market in Molyvos)

If the Greeks were to celebrate Saint Nicholas like they do in Holland, the women’s co-operatives would be busy as hell. Because the places (besides bakeries) that specialize in making sweets, are those run by these groups of women — baking cookies, making jams and marzipan.

A few decennia ago they started these local businesses to get the farmers’ wives and housewives out of their isolated position. This way they could learn to run a business and make their own income. Since 1980 at least 11 of these women’s co-operatives have been started on Lesvos and indeed it gives the women something different to do. Most of them have chosen to preserve and bake: a logical choice because, all year round in the Lesbian countryside, there is plenty of fruit and vegetables available. However preserving is time consuming, so I can imagine that sitting around a table mounted high with nuts or summer fruit, you’d happy to share this with other women whilst gossiping, discussing and laughing as you peel, de-stem and chop. These co-operatives are a solution for housewives who are bored, for women who love to cook; the small harvests are shared and preserved and this way traditional recipes will not get lost. Because I imagine these women cook exactly as their grandmothers have taught them.

As far as I know the only women co-operative that does something different here on the island is the women’s co-operative of Petra, where since 1983 women have run a Bed & Breakfast and a small diner above a pub at the central square by the sea.

At the other co-operatives, in Agiasos, Anemotia, Polichnitos, Filia, Molyvos, Parakila, Asomatos and Mesopotos, they merely make jams, the famous gliko tou koetaliou (preserved fruit and vegetables in sugar sirup) as well as baking cookies and cakes. They also make marzipan with walnut and almonds from which they create the most wonderful flowers and other decorative things. These beautiful creations are mostly given as presents at important festive events. I love marzipan, but when I get such an exotic flower I display it for weeks on the table until dust settles upon it and I have to throw it away.

I am sure they could also produce the candy that is traditional for the Dutch celebration of Saint Nicholas (characters made of chocolate, special biscuits as small as a nut, animals made out of coloured sugar) but in Greece they don’t have such a tsunami of candy at the beginning of December, because the Day of Saint Nicholas is not a celebration for children like it is in Holland. For the Greeks Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of the fishermen (see: Saint Nicholas) and on the 6th of December all people named after this saint – Nicos – celebrate their nameday.

Anyhow, the Greeks are not big candy eaters. There are some ouzo- and mastic candies, probably produced for the tourists and they make Turkish Delight, called in Greek loukoumia (jelly-like preserved fruit coated with fine sugar).

All Greek celebration days have their own sweets, mostly cakes or cookies. For example during Christmas they bake kourambides (almond cookies) and melomakarona (cookies dipped into honey); chocolate rings and balls are not part of the Greek Christmas culture. They used not to even have a Christmas tree to hang them in. Although nowadays you see more and more Greeks having a Christmas tree and chocolate rings and balls to hang in the tree. But this is a new trend coming from abroad.

The regular candy here in Greece – if you can call those candy - are the chocolate bonbons and some are so big that you better call them chocolate bonbon cookies. The easiest ones to make at home are the almonds coated with chocolate; but these chocolate fantasies are really a threat for your teeth because they are so hard.

And then there are the sugared almonds, koufeta in Greek. These are traditionally presented together with the invitation to a wedding or a baptism. They are a symbol of the good and the bad times: the bitter taste of the almond stands for the difficult times in a wedding or a life, and the sugar coating for the happy times. And you have to be sure that you put an uneven number in the bag because an even number can be divided and symbolizes a divorce.

The candy-month has started, also in Greece where they have started baking for Christmas. Last Sunday there was the Christmas market in Molyvos where they presented lots of cookies and cakes. Because of the crisis I bet that most of the women will be producing their Christmas sweets at home, baked in the wood stove of course. I wonder if the women’s co-operatives – that mostly sell at fairly high prices – will survive the ongoing crisis.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Treasure maps

2011-11-29T08:44:00.000-08:00

(Map of Lesvos from 1597 by Giacomo Franco)

During my daily walks along the sea I’ve stated that since at least several months the sea has been at a very low level. Wasn’t the sea level supposed to rise? Whether it storms or not, the water remains much lower than it was last year. I have never seen it so low. The Aegean doesn’t have strong tides, so could there be another system, unknown to me, that makes the sea lower or higher from one year to another?

I looked for it on the internet, but found nothing, except that it seems that the North Aegean gets colder (although that depends on the winters) and that there are certain gulfs in the North Aegean which are more vulnerable to tsunamis (Lesvos is not one of those regions).
I found a report about the correlation between the rise of the sea level and the warming of the earth (which is already well known, but I don’t see the sea rising). And Wikipedia says that during the last glacial period – some 16.000 years ago - the sea level of the Aegean was about 130 metres lower. That must have been in the times that the island was still part of the Asiatic landmass.

It fascinates me to imagine that between the island and Turkey there used to be a large landscape and that in fact we are living in the mountains. This area off course is still there, although now is part of the underwater world. And now that the sea gives some of it back to the sun, I see rocks appearing that I never saw before. Is it possible that I will soon see the appearance of a wall, the remains of a harbour or a house or a castle?

On the old maps you should be able to see what was where in the past. The oldest maps (in general) – or descriptions of maps – date from before the birth of Christ. The man that is called the father of the cartography, Claudius Ptolemaeus, lived around the first century (ca. 87 – 150). This Greek astronomer, astrologer, geographer, mathematical and music theorist, published a guide about how to make maps: the Cosmographia of Geographia. Based on Ptolemaeus’ findings, in 1482 the German Johannes Armsshein made a map that might be the oldest preserved map of the world.

You will find Lesvos on the map but it is so small that you can’t see more than the fact that it’s an island. In 1584 the Flemish cartographer Abraham Orthelius draw a map of the island Crete with below ten smaller maps of other islands: Kythira, Karpathos, Rhodes, Chios, Naxos, Santorini, Milo, Limnos, Evvia and Lesvos.
Some years later in 1597 it was the Italian Giacomo Franco who made a map specifically of the island of Lesvos, and another preserved antique map of Lesvos was made around 1800 by the Frenchman Choiseul-Gouffier, where he also depicted Lesvos’ biggest attractions of that time: the throne of Potamon (http://smitaki.blogspot.com/2011/04/throne-of-potamon.html), the aqueduct of Moria and a wall sculpture.

When walking over the island or making a tour by car, many a tourist must be cursing when he discovers that his map is inaccurate. There are no accurate maps of the island and there are some maps where you feel that the cartographer just made scribbles to mark the roads. But those antique maps won’t help you out either. Look at the two earliest maps mentioned above: the form of the island is too stretched: the capital Mytilini is placed north east instead of south east).

And where is Mythimna (Molyvos)? And why is it that Petra is in the south? Or should I have turned the map a quarter? But then some places are actually completely wrong. Would the cartographer actually has explored the island or just visited Mytilini where he was helped by locals to draw the map? In those times the rest of the island was pretty wild and it was hard to travel around the island. The easiest way to reach Molyvos for example was by boat. But in those times most people did not go any further than the capital.

What is striking about those old maps are the fairly large rivers and a few islands along the shore. How high would the sea level have been in those times? Mytilini used to be on an island, separated from the mainland by a canal. They filled in the canal and that is now Ermou, the most important shopping street of Mytilini.

And what about the large number of castles depicted in the ancient maps? There even is a Greek ruin designed close to Mytilini. But where is the castle of Molyvos? And anyhow, where have all those castles and the Greek temple gone? The maps are like treasure maps and sometimes I get the same feeling I got when visiting the Valley of the Kings in Luxor (Egypt), where you walked in an area where even today many tombs must be hidden, because they never found the tombs of all the pharoahs.

The maps do prove that, over the centuries, the island has changed a lot: rivers have shrunk and castles and temples disappeared completely. It is difficult to determine from the map how high the sea was. But because of the many small islands and the large river estuaries, my guess is that the sea then was much higher. So maybe one day I will see a ruin rise out of the sea now that the sea gets lower, although on the place where I guess Eftalou is located on the maps, there are no old castles to be seen. But that does not mean that there cannot be one, because I can’t find the castle of Molyvos on those early maps either. Strange, because Mythimna (the ancient name for Molyvos) was an important part of the history of Lesvos and the castle was definitely there in the fifteenth century.

(With thanks to Mary Staples)

@ smitaki 2011

Do you know the mussel man?

2011-11-24T09:07:00.000-08:00

(Oyster beds in the Gulf of Kalloni)

Yes, I know the mussel man, the mussel man lives in Skala Polichnitou*. In the winter Lesvos makes up a small part of the Greek mussel industry. That is to say, if all goes well and the local fishing unions are not at war with each other.

Three local fishing unions are fishing in the same pond: the Gulf of Kalloni. The fishermen of Skala Kallonis who want to go fishing for mussels depend on the fishermen of Skala Polichnitou, where the main commerce of mussels takes place on the island. This year however there are enough fishermen in Skala Polichnitou to not need the fishermen from Skala Kallonis. The Skala Kallonis’ fellows felt so frustrated being without a job that they have decided to make life difficult for their fishing colleagues: they complained to the authorities that too many undersized mussels were being sold and so the inspection service decided that all mussels coming out of the Gulf of Kalloni should be measured and that they must be at least 5 cm.

One fisherman had decided to go fishing for mussels and other shellfish this winter. It was a big decision to make, because if you don’t have a diver’s certificate and two year’s of shellfish experience, you need to hire a diver who has those qualifications to harvest the mussels from the sea bottom (which is the most usual way to catch shell fish on this island). And then you must have lots of patience in order to obtain all the licences and you’ll also need a small investment fund. The boat of the fisherman belongs to the small fishing fleet of Skamnioudi and even before going out on the water, this man had a buyer in Thessaloniki for his catch. When he found a crew, all papers were regulated, his boat was converted for shellfish catching and when the winds slowed down he finally set off to sea (although you cannot call the Gulf of Kalloni really a sea, because only at its end is there a small connection with the sea).

I have no idea how many mussels make up one kilo. But I can imagine, that as a boat can catch hundreds of kilos a day, measuring mussels is not the work you look forward to, after coming ashore after a day of hard work at sea. It also means loosing time in getting your catch to its buyer and time and extra labour is money. Then after making your calculations, you find it’s better not to play the mussel man, because with all those extra costs you’re better off staying in the harbour.

Ai, ai, ai, those Greeks. They can be so bloody jealous!

In Holland you mostly eat cultivated mussels, but here on Lesvos it’s the wild ones that live on the bottom of both the Gulf of Kalloni and the Gulf of Gera. With their beards they anchor themselves to the sea bottom and they feed by filtering plankton out of the sea water. When they are a few years old they are ready for consumption.

There is another difference: in Holland it is the blue mussel (Mytilus edulis) that is commonly eaten while here on Lesvos it is the Mediterranean Mussel (Mytilus galloprovincialis). Not that I know the difference. Last week I ate Mediterranean Mussels in the Dutch way, meaning that I served them cooked accompanied with bread and some dip sauces. They were so delightful that, for a split second, I got homesick for the restaurants in Amsterdam where I used to eat mussels on a regular base.

Greeks eat them in a different way, normally as a meze with ouzo. They eat them raw with a sprinkle of lemon juice, just like oysters. I do not support eating raw oysters (I love the taste but get sick) and so I don’t eat mussels raw. I‘d rather cook them to be on the safe side.

A Greek recipe with cooked mussels is midia saganaki: mussels in a tomatoe sauce with feta, just like the garides saganaki (with shrimps). But there is an easy way to make your Dutch (or other local) mussels in a Greek way: you just add some ouzo to the cooking juice.

The story that you have to discard the mussels that remain closed after cooking seems to be a fairy tale. That’s just a mussel with very strong muscles. They just don’t give-up during cooking but you can open them and enjoy their tastey meat (really bad mussels will smell strongly).

The Greek tragedy of the newly made mussel man has not finished yet. The hired diver (the new mussel man has a diver’s certificate but only one year’s experience on a shellfish boat) caught so few mussels that there was a quarrel and the diver left. Now the boat is anchored in the harbour and the remaining fishermen still have to charge more for their catch. I am wondering how long it will take for the buyer on the mainland to find cheaper mussels. Because then Lesvos can say goodbye to its mussel industry and they may never come out of the crisis.

Together we know the mussel man, the mussel man, the mussel man
Together we know the mussel man, he lives in Thessaloniki*

* A traditional folk song from Hollland: ‘Zeg, ken jij de mosselman?’

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Creative with firewood

2011-11-15T08:10:00.000-08:00

(olive firewood)

Last September the Athenian firm McKinsky & Company published a report about how the Greek economy had fallen so low and what can be done, in the next ten years, in order to get the economy on a higher level again. Because Greece has enough potential to return to a healthy economy.

The report shows the weak spots like the investment climate of Greece that performs poorly because of complicated officialdom and laws. The number of officials should not only be reduced, but the whole system should be reorganized in order to work more efficiently, and old laws should be changed so that it is easier to start a business.

Greece should also be more commercial. For example: olive oil from Spain and Italy is famous, but when you enjoy an Italian olive oil it could be that you are using a Greek olive oil. Italy buys lots of oil from Greece, mixed or not with its own oil, and markets it as an Italian olive oil. So the Italians not only earn money but also get the credit for producing good olive oil, although more and more Greeks win prizes on international contests for having the best olive oil.

Greece is not only a country of sun and sea. Plenty of holiday islands have more specialities, like the sweet wine from Samos, more than one very good wine from Limnos, mastic from Chios and ouzo from Lesvos. Lots of islands – like Crete and Lesvos – produce tasty cheeses (amongst others feta), honey and of course olive oil. Lesvos also produces salt, sardines and shellfish.

For the last few days the island is under the spell of a cold northern wind and most people are sitting around their woodstoves. As I wrote a few weeks ago, lots of people have exchanged their central heaters or other oil and electricity consuming stoves for a wood stove in order to economize on their electricity and oil bills.

You can burn all kind of things in a woodstove, but it’s an art to keep the fire burning in the stove. The very first rule is that you don’t use fresh wood. Most wood must dry for about a year.

Looking for the best firewood on the internet, you will find many American websites (where they also still use a lot of woodstoves and open fireplaces) where they explain exactly which wood is best to use and how to store your firewood.

Ash, red oak, white oak, beech, birch, hickory, hard maple, pecan, dogwood, almond and apple are the trees that provide the best firewood. They probably do not grow too many olives there in the States (or don’t they use woodstoves in California where most American olives are grown?), because I could not find olivewood on any list.

I knew that the monks from Mount Athos (that monastery state in the north-east of Greece) are busy people but I did not know that they’re also wood tradesmen. They offer for sale oak- and olivewood, but also wood from the strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo), a wood that is much appreciated on the firewood lists of Greece.

On Lesvos there are also plenty of strawberry trees, but these are not big trees, they are more like bushes with rather thin, beautiful coloured red trunks. I am wondering how many of these bushes you’d have to cut in order to get a reasonable big stack of wood. You’d think they would cut the whole Mt Athos bald? But the olive wood they offer comes from Corfu. Because this western tourist island also produces and exports large quantities of olive wood, mainly to the neighbouring country Italy where the wood is used in the pizza ovens.

I wonder why Lesvos is not selling wood. Does the island of Corfu have more olive trees or smarter salesmen? Or have they not also returned to the woodstoves? I know that Lesvos has enough olive wood to provide for its own inhabitants. They don’t have to cut those beautiful strawberry trees. There aren’t so many oak trees left – the original vegetation of the island – and they should not be touched. Because the pinewoods still have plenty of dead trees lying around. Whilst pinewood is not the best quality of firewood – it burns more quickly – it still can warm you up. I note also that chestnut trees are not the best quality but I am sure that a tree from the chestnut wood above Agiasos could keep you warm for a whole winter. And what about those majestic plane trees? They don’t live forever. And then there are plenty of almond trees to be pruned and they also provide first quality wood. Only it’s a very hard wood, so be careful when sawing it. So there is plenty of wood here on the island, why not export it?

The search on the internet provided more surprises: how do you stack your firewood? You can just throw it on an unorganized heap or build a nice wall with it. Seeing all the other possibilities I now dream of mountains of firewood and being able to realise such beautiful creations. So be careful not to become a wood hoarder, because for these projects you need lots of wood:

How to build a wood stack?, A tree ‘in’ pieces and a firewood house, A cute house, A wood stack for Valentines day (see third picture), Modern furniture from firewood, Firewood art from Nikolay Polissky, A wood stack in the house, A decorative wall, A woodfire entrance.

So these are plenty of ideas to keep you busy during the winter. And there is plenty of wood to keep you sitting around the fire and thinking about new plans to get Greece out of its crisis.

(Thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Let the water fall

2011-11-10T08:09:00.000-08:00

The tree root sculpture at the waterfall of Klapados

Last week on November 4th there was an article in the Lesviot paper Embros from Chrisidou Vangelio, who wrote that a group of nature lovers stated that there were more than 14 waterfalls on the island worth visiting. The environments of Parakila, Skoutaros, Mesotopos, Vatoussa, Mandamados, Antissa, Pelopi and Eresos seem to be particularly rich with waterfalls.

When you look on the internet for the waterfalls of Europe, there are only two named in the whole of Greece: the Edessa waterfalls, about a 100 km northwest of Thessaloniki and the Rihti waterfall in the Rihti gorge on Crete. So Lesvos should be proud having at least 14 waterfalls, with the biggest one close to Eresos (Krinilou).

I had to laugh a little when it was mentioned that the nature lovers went to the Island’s government to enlist help in getting money from Europe to promote the waterfalls and make them accessible to more visitors. That means that paths and roads would have to be built. But in this crisis I wonder if Europe will be happy about a Greek island asking for money; as they already provide the whole country with money. Or could there be somewhere in Europe a special jar with money for waterfalls for which they can apply?

But it would be totally crazy to provide money to make new paths and roads to these waterfalls, while the normal roads are falling apart and there’s no money to repair them. As it is, next year there may no longer be a road to Eftalou, because when we get the next real heavy winter storm, this road will disappear into the sea.

Don’t get me wrong, I do wish everybody could visit these waterfalls. You can in fact visit them now, if you are in good shape and if you know where they are. But it’s quite an adventure to reach them over slippery donkey trails that sometime seems closer to steep gorges.

Last week I was at the Klapados waterfall. The waterfall itself is impressive but also the place itself is rich with water and great plane trees that come in all forms and shapes. It also has an astonishing silence and I can’t imagine being too happy visiting this waterfall along with a busload of tourists exclaiming ah’s and oh’s while their children are loudly splashing in the water. So if they make this waterfall accessible to more people I demand that there be a sign: SILENCE!

The problem of the waterfalls of Lesvos is not only that they’re not easy to reach, but there is not always water. The once so impressive Pesos waterfall near Achladeri has – since I visited it two years ago – been reduced to a small trickle, because farmers have illegally siphoned off water somewhere above the waterfall. The Pesos waterfall is actually the only one on the island with direction signs and to be reached by a lovely path with wooden handrails. And now even in the winter water barely trickles over the steep cliffs.

The Krinilou waterfall’s problem is that the area has been shut down by the owner. A few years ago some vandals (yes, indeed, we sometimes have vandals on the island) damaged his paradise so much, that you can visit it now only on appointment.

Not all waterfalls have enough water in the summer to show their falling streams. The Klapados waterfall is dry in the summer and if just a little rain falls in autumn, it can take some time before you can enjoy its beauty.

This is the case now. The Klapados waterfall is dry, because the two days of rain we have had since last summer were barely enough to get the water flowing. However, the steep wall of rocks where the water normally falls, now shows its splendid sculpture of tree roots that try to find the water among the rocks.

The drought is also the reason that there are no mushrooms on the island this autumn. Last year you tripped over them and now you really have to visit the most humid places on the island in order to find those popular pèperites or peppery milkcaps (Lactarius piperatus) and the bright red coloured Caesar’s mushrooms (Amanita caesarea).

So this group of nature lovers that want to promote the waterfalls of Lesvos should first start a rain dance and then a money dance.

Now I still have ten waterfalls to find, because I have only seen the one close to Mandamados, and the Pesos, Klapados and Krinilou waterfalls. So I also have to dance – a dance around the island – to find them this winter. I’ll keep you informed.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Sardian nuts

2011-11-03T08:38:00.000-07:00

(Sweets from the Russian olive tree)

Even after two years the leaders of Europe could not save Greece from an economical downfall, nor could they stop the crisis in Europe. Alexander the Great only needed ten years to conquer half the world.

Imagine that just to travel on foot to India nowadays would take you more than a year. And Alexander, who dragged an army of ten thousand behind him, wasn’t simply doing a pilgrimage like a walk to Compostella (Spain). His forces did more than kilometres per day; during their travels they were busy fighting bloody battles, Alexander entertained himself with the people he conquered and made sure that his army was invincible.

His army was good at inventing military devices, like the torsion catapult, but it is also said that Alexander invented shaving. He insisted that his soldiers shaved every day in order that during battle the enemy had no grip on his soldiers’ beards.

Alexander not only conquered half the world; he also changed it. He spread Greek culture far and wide and in return his soldiers experienced and acknowledged new cultures. And, believe me, they certainly brought home lots of things, like apples and aubergines, from these foreign countries,.

Alexander came across the Sardian nut tree, not so far from home, in Sardis, the capital of the ancient empire of Lydia (West-Turkey), which had been conquered by the Persians before Alexander himself. Obviously much taken by that tree, he ordered his army to plant Sardian trees all over Greece. Later the Romans dispersed this tree even further through their vast empire.

And this is how the chestnut tree, as the Sardian nut tree is now known, came to Europe. In Asia, chestnuts had already been known for thousands of years as a staple food and when people couldn’t afford to grow corn, or when a harvest went wrong, they would use the chestnut to make flower for their breads.

Nowadays you will mainly be served roasted chestnuts when visiting one of the chestnut festivals in Greece: in Kastanitsa (Arcadia), Paleochori (Kavala), Damaskinia (Kozani), Karitsa (Larissa), Arna (Laconia), Elos (Crete) and in Agiasos on Lesvos.
Although the Greek kitchen has a large variety of chestnut recipes: stuffed turkey, garlic sauce with chestnuts, rice with chestnuts and chestnut cakes.

I love chestnuts, but I also hate this fruit. I enjoy eating them a lot; but I hate to peel chestnuts.

When I go to the chestnut wood above Agiasos I am always tempted to bring home a large bag of chestnuts. There are thousands that wait to be picked up. Once home I roast some and then I gather courage to peel some for a chestnut puree. To do this requires some time. With a sharp knife you make a cross in the outer shell, then you cook them in some water for a few minutes and then you can remove the outer shell and start peeling them.
Chestnuts don’t have a smooth skin, but rather like walnuts, the skin has a ribbed surface with folds with requires a lot of patience remove.

No sooner have I made the puree than this delicacy is consumed. And although I intend to make another one, I usually don’t fancy doing it — so I will never make it nor do something else with the rest of the chestnuts.

Now I find myself with another basket full of chestnuts brought back from Agiasos. The first ones have been roasted. And even though it was a real job to peel them I enjoyed them a lot; but preparing another chestnut puree, pfffff, I just can’t face it. Last night I took a look on the internet: hoping to find an easier way to peel them and indeed I found a new tip to get rid of these nasty skins. I immediately commenced work to test the tip.

Eureka! It does work! And it’s even more simple. So instead of the dangerous job of making a cross incision on the flat side (when before you know it your knife shoots across the hard surface of the outer shell and causes cuts your fingers)– with a big knife you just have to chop the chestnuts in half. You put them in a casserole, cover with cold water, boil the chestnuts for some minutes and then you pull off both their skins with pincers. If I do like this peeling method, I might use all the chestnuts to make a nice chestnut bread and I might even try out a recipe for the famous French marrons glacés.

While experimenting with the chestnuts, I took some sweets from the ‘Sweet Tree’ to roast them on my new woodstove. They come from the Russian olive tree or silver berry (Elaeagnus angustifolia). A neighbour told me that when she was a child they used to roast and eat them. According to her they tasted like marshmallows. The tree looks like a weeping willow and its fruit is like light brown olives. When raw the inside looks like candy floss but their taste is dry and mealy. My finding is that when you warm them up (slightly roasted), they don’t get a taste like a marshmallow but more like a warm candy floss. Which is not bad for a sweet you can get free from nature. I can imagine that roasting these Russian olives will be a good substitute when chestnuts are not around.

(With thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

The good old times

2011-10-25T08:52:00.000-07:00

(Vangelis cutting wood)

During these times of crisis, many must be thinking: Away with the Greeks! But I don’t think that the Greeks alone have contributed to this European crisis. And have you ever thought how the world would be if there had never been Greeks?

In the last decades Greece has become known as a popular holiday destination and as a country with mighty shipping magnates. In ancient times however Greece was the birthplace of lots of scientists and philosophers and many of their inventions and theories are still part of the modern world.

For example, when you get brutally awakened from your sweet dreams by your alarm clock, do you ever think of Plato, who may have used the very first alarm clock? And then when you take your shower, do you realise that in the fourth century BC Greeks were also taking showers and, just like you, they used a bar of soap? Then you check your computer. Centuries ago Greeks did the same: The Antikythera mechanism is the famous analog computer that was found, about a century ago, in a shipwreck close to the island of Antikythera. Only recently has it been discovered how smart this mechanism is. It calculates astrological positions and it can calculate the dates for cultural events like the Olympic Games.
When you set off to work and you take along some chewing gum, you will be chewing on a Greek invention. And when you unfurl your umbrella against the rain, you take shelter under another Greek invention.
The list of Greek inventions is much longer and also contains the anchor, the catapult, the steam machine, the thermometer and central heating.

According to Wikipedia central heating was invented by the Roman Sergius Orata. The system used to be called hypocaust and was originally floor heating: in ancient Greek hypo means under and caust means burnt. So the name is Greek and according to Pliny the Elder, long before the Romans marched into Greece, there were houses and buildings that had this hypocaust system. So, it’s more accurate to say that the Greeks invented central heating and that the Romans adjusted it.

Last week this invention was bitterly needed, because we suddenly got a preview of winter: the thermometer descended to below 5oC! Suddenly this beautiful Indian summer was gone and the heaters had to be lit.

Most people here on the island have oil-fired central heating. But some ten years ago the heaters on Lesvos were mainly small oil or electric heaters and some people had a woodstove or an open fire. Nowadays there are even people who survive the winter with only their aircon. But in latter years many people have changed to central heating and no newly build house is without it. Just like in ancient times.

In Ephesus they have found the remains of a hypocaust: air was heated and was transported through clay pipes to the houses (of the rich) and public buildings. Although in that time they did not use oil to create the heat.

Did they use gas? Natural gas comes from the earth and cannot be claimed as an invention; but in ancient Greece they were already using natural gas. Some thousands years BC, there was a shepherd on Mount Parnassus who discovered a fountain of fire coming from the earth. The flame would not stop and was seen as a sign from a god. That is why they built a temple around the flame: the famous temple of Delphi, where priestesses used this eternal fire to see into the future. Gas was used as an oracle fire.

Could these priestesses have foretold that there would one day be a time when the Greeks could no longer pay for their central heating? The price of the oil has now risen so high that many Greeks can no longer afford it and on the island many people are rushing to buy woodstoves.

In a way, the heat of a woodstove is better than that of a central heating system. Lots of houses here on Lesvos fight against moisture that causes mould on the walls. No matter how much you clean or cover the walls with water resisting paint, the mould always comes back. The best way to fight it is to burn a woodstove that takes the moisture away.

So lots of people will benefit from buying a woodstove: the heat is more efficient and using one is many times cheaper than buying this incredibly expensive oil. The island has enough wood: the lop (pruning wood) of the olive fields and the many dead trees in the woods.

So the countryside will be more busy this coming winter. People will be going into the woods more often to pick-up a free meal, searching for wild vegetables (chorta) and mushrooms. And there will be a new group coming: wood poachers.

The old Greek empire also gave birth to money: coins were invented in what is present day Western Anatolia, where Greek city-states were invaded by the Lydians. The first coin was made during the rule of King Alyattes II. He was the father of the legendary King Croesus, famous for the proverb As rich as Croesus. Croesus was so rich he could afford to build one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: the famous Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. And who knows — maybe he also installed central heating there.

Times however have changed since rich King Croesus. So where have all those mighty kings and smart scientist gone, now that the Greeks have no money left and cannot afford the oil for their central heaters?

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Crocodiles on Lesvos

2011-10-17T04:20:00.000-07:00

(Kafenion in Agios Dimitrios; Photo: Fenna Westerdiep)

Lesvos is a rather big island: 1650 km2. Crete, the largest island of Greece is 8336 km2 and Evia, the second largest is 3584 km2. Lesbos is not overly populated; according to a count this year, 85.000 people live on it, while on Crete some 621.000 and on the smaller island of Rhodes (1398 km2) 119.000. Even fewer people live on Lesvos now than ten years ago. In 2001, 90.643 living souls were counted on Lesvos.

I have no idea how long it would take you to drive around the island by car, nor do I know how much time it would take you to walk it. Roads don’t always follow the coast and the main roads cut right through the heart of the island. But I do know now how long it takes to paddle with a kayak around the island: 5 days.

At the beginning of October Nektarios Paraskevidis from Mandamados proved that the journey along the 320 km long coastline of Lesvos was not that difficult. He departed from Mytilini, having loaded his kayak with food, drinks and a tent to sleep in. He peddled around 10 hours each day and slept overnight on the beaches of Plomari, Tavari, Lapsarna and Tsonia. The only problem he encountered was peddling against the wind. So now you know how much time you will need to circumnavigate the island by kayak.

Lesvos is a pretty old island. It was once part of the Asian landmass and maybe that was the case when millions of years ago the southwest part of Lesvos was a huge lake. The lake was more or less filled up and disappeared when two vulcanoes spewed their fire and lava over the island. This is what created the petrified trees that are now found mainly in the west of the island.

Those trees that were changed into stone, as if by magic, can be seen in the Petrified Forest and the Natural History Museum in Sigri, where you can also learn lots about the natural changes that took place on the island. But what was living on the island when the sequoias towered to heaven and there was a lake that now is just barren land?

Some years ago near Gavathas they found evidences of a huge prehistoric elephant: the Prodeinotherium bavaricum. But there had been no further knowledge about what animals dwelled in the woods or lived in the lake; until last June, when professor Katarina Vassiliadou revealed her discoveries at the 9th congress of the European Association of Vertebrate Palaeontologists on Crete.

In the sediments of the old lake, Katarina found traces of snails, lake fish, reptiles and even prehistoric crocodiles! We are of course speaking about a time some twenty million years ago; so when visiting the turtles that still live here in the small lakes and rivers, don’t be afraid, that a large head with a giant jaw and sharp teeth will suddenly appear out of the water and snap at your hand as you attempt to pat a turtle.

Wildlife on Lesvos has not done well since those ancient times. There remain now are only lots of foxes, some wild boar and a single variety of deer. So when you participate in a safari it won’t be like in Africa, where you can meet giraffes, elephants and crocodiles. Here you will only cross paths with some wild cats, dogs, cows and horses.

Nor has Lesvos that many thousands-of-year-old buildings or temples. Close to Klopedi and Messa (near Agia Paraskevi) there remain some standing pillars from an Aeolian and Ionian temple. Mostly Lesvos has to do with the remains of centuries-old little churches from Byzantium and the Middle Ages and a few old castles.

Nonetheless tourists still say that the island is unique and authentic, more so than the popular Greek islands like Rhodes or Crete. Lesvos does not have famous temples, but beside its hundreds of little churches and tens of monasteries, it is rich with very old kafenions.

Those are, of course, not hundreds-of-years-old, but I bet that some can celebrate their hundredth birthday. When you travel through the sleepy villages of Lesvos you’ll find more than one old kafenion per village, where, behind the counter, the grandmother prepares mezèdes (little snacks) to be served with the ouzo.

The hamlet Agios Dimitrios, famous for its springs, seems only to exist of two kafenions and one real Loungebar. You can find it – just before Agiasos, along a byroad ‘The old road’, a kind of bypass off the new road from Polichnitos to Agiasos. Since the kafenions no longer face the main road they tend to look almost forlorn; but their environment is breathtaking: they are surrounded by old chestnut and walnut trees. Within the interiors, on their huge verandas, that seem not to have been changed since the Fifties, they serve you coffee and other drinks with a Spoon Sweet (sweet preserved fruit and vegetables), for which they are famous.

Young Greeks, however, want something different from those dusty kafenions of their grandparents’ time – so they have their Loungebar opposite. Even so, the entrance door of the Loungebar is kept in a beautiful and colourful old style.

Just like the crocodiles, elephants and old Greek temples, those old kafenions with their interiors, worthy of museum status, are doomed to disappear. But for the time being, Lesvos still is like an open air museum, full of little churches and kafenios in a gorgeous natural setting, that – if the vulcanoes keep guiet – will remain so for many more years.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Rain

2011-10-13T00:27:00.000-07:00

Rain over the Gulf of Kalloni

On Saturday we were all looking forward for the rain to fall. After a summer with only blue skies, you want something different. But instead of the rain, we got the last trick of the season from our arsonist. He set fire to a field left from the road from Molyvos to Favios. The southwest wind that preceded the rain was blowing hard; the firemen were not at strength, because, amongst other things, there were no planes to help control the fire as they already were parked in their winter stabling.

The fire was lit in at least five different places and it was free to travel; it hurried up the mountains in the direction of both Eftalou and Vafios. Within two hours the fire crept over the mountain at the camping site at Eftalou, where it threatened a farm and houses. Fortunately the firemen on the road to the dump knew how to stop the fire; because had it gone further, crossing that road, the fire would have found a paradise of pines and olive trees and then the disaster would been great and Eftalou left totally blackened and charred.

About an hour after the last flames were extinguished, a hesitant rain started to pour down from the black sky. There was just enough water to give the people living around the fire a worryless sleep.

On Sunday thundering clouds sailed by and flashing lightning hurried along the horizon but it was only at night that the downpour started and on Monday the Heavens opened and let down a continuous fall of water.

That was enough to put out all fires and a blessing for the olive trees, which, for the moment, received enough water – thank you – in order to get ready for a good harvest.

The falling rain also lowered the temperatures and so finally the long and beautiful summer has come to an end.

Tomorrow the sun will be back, but then the leaves will whirl down and temperatures will no longer reach 30oC. Fresh green grasses, yellow and purple autumn crocus and pink cyclamen are emerging from the earth: Kalo ftinopero (have a good autumn), like the Greeks say.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Walnut blues

2011-10-06T00:46:00.000-07:00

Walnuts

Once upon a time there was a King in Laconia who had three daughters: Orphe, Lyco and Carya. One day the god Apollo visited and he spent such a nice time at the palace in Laconia that he rewarded the daughters of the king by giving them the power to see into the future: on the one condition that they would never do anything against the wishes of a god. A while later it was Dionysus who paid a visit to the palace. He fell in love with Carya. But Carya’s sisters were jealous and did everything to prevent the two lovers from meeting. The sisters had to be punished because this was going against a wish of a god. Orphe and Lyco went mad and turned into rocks. Carya was changed into a walnut tree.

And this is how the walnut tree (Juglans regia) became a symbol for wisdom and in ancient times was sometimes seen as an oracle. Not only was Carya’s name given to the nut tree (in Greek karydia), but also to a Greek style of building: caryatids. These are sculpted female figures serving as architectural supports, pillars. The most famous Caryatids can be found at the Parthenon in Athens, where six female columns support the roof of the Erechteion.

Others say that these female pillars are named after the village Carya, a place on the Peloponessus famous for its walnuts. Once there was a temple for Artemis Caryatis, where women danced for this goddess with large baskets full of reed on their heads.

You might find a caryatid in Mytilini; but there are not many of them on the island. Though there are plenty of walnut trees around, because its fruit is an important ingredient in the Greek kitchen, especially in sweet dishes.

Just like olives, walnuts are beaten out of the trees. And because a walnut tree is far bigger than an olive tree, the beaters have climb into the trees with their sticks. So don’t be amazed if, walking along, you find a tree full of men striking with full force the branches with sticks. Under the tree the women will wait patiently to gather all the fallen fruit.

The walnut grows in a green shell and when this bursts open or turns black, it’s harvest time. And then work is just beginning; because often you have to get the nut out of this green shell. When I first did this job I didn’t listen to a neighbour who warned me to wear gloves. So my fingers turned brown and the stain stayed for days. With these green shells you can make a wonderful hair dye, used by Greek women to keep their hair beautifully black. Deep black is also the colour of the liquor made out of unripe walnuts.

Once the nut has been removed from its soft green shell it has to be cracked open, which is another time consuming job because cracking of nuts requires some skill with or without a nutcracker. A friend of mine told me that as a child he cracked the nuts in the door hinge. I thought this a very clever idea; but he told me that the only result was that his father got mad because the inner walnut shells are so hard that they can damage the door. In the aeroplane industry the hard shells are used for polishing, NASA still uses ground shells for insulation) material and in the old times bakers used ground nut shells to make an anti-stick coating in their ovens.

In these beautiful autumnal days you might see old women sitting outside with large heaps of walnuts in front of them, carefully cracking all the nuts. They patiently do their job so that they have enough cracked walnuts to make cakes, cookies or a famous baklava.

Baklava is that very sweet pastry in which a filling of nuts is put between filo layers and then it is doused with a sugar syrup or honey. Baklava is also made with pistachios, almonds and pinenuts, as well as walnuts.

All over the world this pastry is called baklava, although spelled differently in each country and it’s fairly certain that it comes from the Ottoman Empire. According to Wikipedia it originated in the kitchens in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul where, every fifteenth of the month during Ramadan, the sultan presented huge plates of baklava to his Janissaries. Others say that this sweet pastry was already known in Mesopotamia or that it was a popular desert in Byzantium times.

How old it may be and wherever it came from, the recipes for baklava were brought to Greece by the refugees from Asia Minor in the Twentieth century and nowadays this pastry is firmly settled in the Greek kitchen. When making a baklava, they always make it big enough to last for days. Of course that also means that it takes many hours to crack the nuts for it.

That doesn’t matter because raw walnuts are good against stress and I imagine that two hours cracking walnuts can also calm you down. Walnuts contain phosphor, magnesium, zinc, iron and calcium; and amongst others things they keep your arteries elastic. They contain twice the antioxidants of other nuts like peanuts, almonds, pistachios and cashews.

So whenever you pass a walnut tree that still has its fruit hanging, beating them out will give you the perfect anti-stress therapy. Look for a nice recipe for cake or cookies with walnuts and you’ll see: walnuts’ curative powers will revive you.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Going away

2011-09-29T00:42:00.000-07:00

Whilst Greece is sinking into the crisis, the sun keeps on shining, as if she wants to warm up the shadows in the hearts of the desperate people before the dark winter starts.

On the island international charter flights still arrive to disgorge loads of tourists: summer was so bad in the West-European countries that lots of people want to see some sun before they enter the cold winter.

However the largest groups of tourists have left the island: the small number of Greeks who could still afford a holiday and the masses of tourists who wanted to spend their holidays at the seaside. Now the island has regained its quietness and it is preparing for the winter. Grapes, figs, and walnuts are greedily harvested.

Spring was cool, wet and unpredictable, for a Greek summer we didn’t have many heat waves, but September was lovely, hot and warm. Last week a front with thunderstorms passed the island with loud concerts of thunder, splashing lightshows, only a short serious downfall and some small rain showers. In the West of the island only some droplets reached the dry earth.

In Soha, close to Leonidio on the Peloponnesus, this bad weather front hit full force, but it didn’t destroy, it left a present. The heavy rain unveiled an old Mycenean cemetery from the 14th century BC - or as the BBC likes to say: before common era - and in some graves were found various bits of old earthenware.

More days followed with happy white and gray clouds chasing each other across the blue sky. Then the sun picked up her dominant place in the sky and autumn seems still far away.

But hidden in the hearts of the people autumn has long started. The Greek people suffer from increasing prices and taxes, bankruptcies and unemployment. More and more retired people return to their villages in the country and on the islands where they came from ¬ because there they still can grow their own food.

Greeks from the mainland (and later the islands) have a long tradition of emigration. Since the Eighth Century BC (BCE) they left to settle on islands and foreign coasts as far as the Black Sea and Egypt. Later many fled back because of political mayhem after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in the Fifteenth century. Then they returned in the Nineteenth century to Egypt and Minor Asia to increase their commerce.

In the Twentieth century it was poverty and oppression that chased them even further into the world. In 1910 a quarter of Greek manpower left for faraway countries like America, where in 1914 more than 35.000 Greeks arrived. A beautiful movie about this emigration is America America made in 1963 by the Greek/American director Elia Kazan, who himself in 1913 emigrated with his parents to New York.

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire (1923) it was not so easy to enter America because of stricter immigration laws. So lots of Greeks then went to Canada, Egypt, Australia, South Africa and South America. Between 1940 and 1974 more than one million Greeks took off with their suitcases. A large number of them however didn’t go that far; but went to work in other European countries. For instance, in 1973 there were over 430.000 Greeks working in West Germany.

Since the end of the Twentieth century Greece itself became a country for immigration. Along with lots of Greeks who returned to their country it was Albanians and Egyptians who came to fill low paid jobs. Now they can all return home, unemployment rises like a barometer going mad.

The history of the last centuries on Lesvos is all the same: in the Twentieth century poverty made lots of people leave the beautiful island, leaving semi-abandoned or empty villages behind, like Ambeliko or Milies.

The amateur historian Vasilis Vasilos became fascinated by stories of the immigrant Lesviot people in Australia, where most Greeks are gathering in clubs according from which Greek region they come from. You even have clubs with people from the same villages like Antissa, Agiasos or Mytilini. Vasilis started to collect their stories and photographs, which has resulted now in two books: Journeys of Uncertainty and Hope and Our Homeland: Lesvos.

His website Syndesmos (where you can find more information about the books) lists which people departed from which village. It is of course not the entire list of emigrants but it gives you an idea of how many families were broken because of the immigration. Some of them have written stories of their lives, which are also on the website. They’re success stories of people who had no future on Lesvos and by very hard work in Australia made new businesses and thus created a dignified existence.

It is fascinating to read these stories. But also it is sad to know why these people left their roots in the Lesviot soil to start a new life far away from their country. Children departed in order that their parents had less mouths to feed; boys were exploited on the tobacco fields or didn’t earn a dime keeping sheep, girls didn’t want to have to marry poor farmers and followed their brothers on the long travels to the unknown.

Greece is again at the border of a heavy crisis. Already on Lesvos, youngsters were leaving for a better future in the big cities of the mainland. Young people are now reaching even further: they try to go abroad for study and better work.

I am wondering if we are at the beginning of an era when bitter poverty will again force many Greeks to pack their bags to find a better life elsewhere. But wherever they will go, their hearts will remain in Greece.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Pearls from the sea

2011-09-22T00:48:00.000-07:00

(Shells from the Greek islands)

Everybody knows that snails have houses and everybody knows what they look like: a long body with two antennae at the head. But do you know what the animals who have been living in the shells that you find on the beach really look like?

On a day here at the beach I was flabbergasted when I admired a Triton-shell that had just been fished out of the sea by a fisherman, and suddenly a very strange creature came creeping out of the shell. It even wore a hat!

The animals that make the beautiful shells we find are molluscs. They have three parts: the foot, the interior and the mantle, which is their skeleton or shell. So they have their skeleton on the outside and use it as a shield from predators. Despite looking so weak, many of these beautiful coloured animals are not so soft and friendly.

They chase other sea animals and even their own kind. One of the biggest Triton shells, the Triton charonia, for example, eats starfish. He stalks them, tears off some of the tough skin of the starfish and injects a poison in order to enjoy his dinner at his ease. Starfish - themselves predators – have a sense that enables them to hear the approach of the Triton monster and many times they try to flee. So a real undersea chase scene follows and even the biggest starfish, the Crown of Thorns (Acanthaster planci) can loose the battle because the Triton-creature is always faster. Can you imagine the picture: an animal that has to tote its beautiful shell and on one foot chases a starfish that also uses only one of his feet for escape?

There are stories told that a human can be killed by a Giant Clam,
(Tridacna gigas), the biggest seashell that can grow to over a metre and live to a hundred years old. When you actually see the animal that lives inside this clam you immediately believe those stories about getting stuck in the shell and drowning: but the stories are said to be fairy tales. Just as it’s not true that the Goddess of Love, Venus, was born out of a Giant Clam, as pictured by the Italian painter Sandro Botticelli in his famous painting The birth of Venus. He might have meant it symbolically, because in his time clams were seen as vulvas. But we all know that Venus was born out of the foam of the waves at Cyprus.

However there are molluscs that can be dangerous for humans. There are some inhabitants of the conus shells who have a bite so venomous that they can kill you. So be aware when you pick up shells from the bottom of the sea that are still inhabited by their creators!

We like to eat shellfish like mussels, oysters, venus shells and Coquilles St Jacques. For many people these are culinary delicacies. In the past shells also had other purposes. The ancient Greeks and Romans used to make a purple dye out of Bolinus brandaris (originally called Murex brandaris). This must have been very expensive stuff because to produce one pound you needed at least 30.000 shells. To make the dye, glands of the sea animals were boiled with salt in urine, so you can imagine what a bad smell that must have been. Whole mountains of these shells have been found and now it is easy to tell exactly where this dye had been made in ancient times. It is a wonder that the Bolinus brandaris survived until this era; it still creeps over the sea bottom around the island.

What I didn’t know is that, in ancient times, they produced seasilk. The silk was made from threads produced mainly by the giant mussel, the Mediterranean fan-shell (Pinna nobilis Linneaeus). Cleaning blue mussels you must have noticed that some beards have to be removed. These hairs are used by the shells to cling to rocks and because the Mediterranean Fan-shell can grow to 90 centimetres and is many times bigger than a blue mussel, you can imagine that he also grows much bigger beards. The silk made with this sea hair is finer, lighter and warmer than the normal silk. Some people think that the Egyptians buried their pharaos in seasilk and in China it is also called mermaid silk.

I recently bought the Dutch book Sea shells from the Greek islands (Schelpen van de Griekse eilanden; only available in Dutch) by Jan Veltkamp and Sylvia van Leeuwen, in which they describe 80 shells to be found on Lesvos and other Greek islands.

In this I discovered the Chama gryphoides Linnaeus and the Pseudochama gryphina with the curious names translated from Dutch: the Right turning jewel box and the Left turning jewel box. They look like the irregular form of an oyster but are smaller and the lower part of the clam is deep and the upper part closes like a lid on a box. I did not have them in my shell collection but now having heard of them I found the Left turning jewel box (Pseudochama gryphina) at the Gulf of Kalloni.

There are no Giant Clams around the island but there are plenty of Venus shells. It is not always easy to distinguish the shells, but the Mediterranean fan-shell is easy to recognize. There still are plenty to be found around both the Gulf of Kalloni and Gera. It is said that they can produce pearls. Pearls are made when some grit enters the shell and gets covered by mother of pearl. So take your change and look for pearls! The Mediterranean fan-shell however is now a protected species, due to over-fishing and pollution. I presume they were not yet protected in 2002, when the publishing house Indiktos in Athens published the booklet Panorexia, ouzo appetizers from Lesvos by Stratis P. Panagos. Amongst the recipes you will find one with the Mediterranean fan-shell: Pinokeftedes. Mix the chopped fan mussel with onions, bread, an egg, some ouzo, trachanas and Oregano, knead it into balls and fry them in the oil. But you are no longer allowed to make those. So I make legal keftedakia with Venus shells (Kidonia). Venus balls — that really sounds good!

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Fighting against Demons

2011-09-13T03:35:00.000-07:00

(cover of Scattered Clearings)

The writer Stratis Myrivilis was born in 1890 in Sykaminia on the island of Lesvos. He grew up in the village and when he was fifteen he went to the gymnasium in Mytilini. He later went to Athens to study law, but not for long, because when in 1912 the First Balkan War began, he joined the Greek army.

When he returned to Lesvos, the island had been freed from the Turks and was filled with refugees from the fallen Ottoman Empire. His first novel Life from the Tomb is about the soldiers’ dreadful life during World War I and is set in the battlefields. His third novel The Mermaid Madonna, about a foundling in a little village, made the fishing village of Skala Sykaminia famous. His second novel The Schoolmistress with the Golden Eyes, published in 1933, has something of both the other novels: the atrocities of the war and the life in a small community.

The story is set in a fictitious village on Lesvos. It is called Megalochori (the real village of Megalochori on Lesvos is above Plomari in the mountains), but it could have been Molyvos, because the village is on the coast and has a castle towering high above it. It’s said that a schoolteacher from Molyvos was the model for the schoolmistress with the golden eyes. She is the widow of the war hero Vranas and is the most beautiful woman of the village.

The main character Leon Drivas is there when Vranas dies in a military hospital. He promises the dying man to bring some personal belongings to his wife Sappho, who lives in the same village where Leon’s family has a summerhouse by the sea. When Leon returns from the war he and his sister go to their summerhouse in Megalochori and he meets Sappho. And you’ve probably already guessed it: he falls in love with the beautiful Sappho. The story is about Leon’s inability to give in to this love because she is the widow of his friend from the war.

And of course, a love affair is no simple matter in a village where all houses have ears and eyes. It is a very traditional village where they will not accept that the widow of a war hero finds another man so quickly. Sappho already turns the heads of all the village men, giving the women even more reason to gossip about this tragic character.

The story is set around 1930 and fifty years later the village is still full of gossips. You can read about this in a newly released Dutch novel, Scattered Clearings (Verspreide opklaringen; not yet translated in English), written by the Dutch writer Peter van Ardenne.

This is the story about Rudolph, a Dutch guy who went to Molyvos in the Eighties to fight his demon: alcohol. A friend advised him to switch the town cafes where beer and jenever flowed plentifully for a sunny island. So lonely Rudolph takes the train and boat to go to Lesvos and ends up in Molyvos.

There is no jenever in Greece but pretty soon Rudolph discovers that there’s as much ouzo flowing in the Greek taverns as ever there was jenever in the Dutch bars.

Rudolph is a foreigner in the Greek village, so he doesn’t care that the villagers know exactly which girls stay at his house and how often he struggles to get home after long hours of drinking. Nor does he care about the attractions of the island that his girlfriends enjoy. Better to go to the beach and have an ouzo party than to visit the Petrified Forest or Eresos.

He is taken in by a group of colourful people who the more they drink, the more discussions they will have, especially about the revolution. But just as Leon in Myrivilis’ novel does not like communism, Rudolph has no sympathy for a revolution. Both main characters dislike politics: Leon because of his experiences during the war and Rudolh, well, he doesn’t believe in anything.

Scattered Clearings is a beautiful book about a person who wants to stop drinking, which is a lot to ask. At the background is Molyvos in the Eighties, when there were few tourists, the only official accommodation being the Hotel Delphinia and most roads – like the one to Eftalou - still dirt tracks. The people of the village were very hospitable but, at the same time, also very gossip-like and quick in judging the libertine life of the foreigners. Even those who come from the ‘faraway’ city of Athens were considered as outsiders.

In those days, many foreigners had been coming to the island for a long time. They were not all like Rudolph, more like Saskia (one of Rudolph’s girl friends) and her father and his friends: writers, scientists and philosophers who were all well integrated in Greek life and knew how to handle the drinking. Lots of these people are still returning to the island and they know most of the villagers.

Peter van Ardenne also returned and has now realised his dream to write a novel. According to him ,it’s a not difficult read: about a cynical person who starts to realise what consequences his behaviour can have. If you were to count the number of bottles emptied during the story, it would be surprising for you not to be fed up with Rudolph who keeps on falling into his own traps – ‘one more glass and then I will stop’. He is cynical and can be pretty blunt, yet the reader will love him. And even though he regularly is too pissed to enjoy the island, there still is magic to be found in the author’s descriptions of island life.

Leon had to fight the demons of his war – the death of his friend Vranas; Rudolph has to fight as hard against his alcohol problem. Whatever demon the model for the Schoolmistress with the golden eyes had to fight is unknown. In Scattered Clearings there is the description how she died: a tragic death worth a novel.

The Schoolmistress with the Golden Eyes, Stratis Myrivilis, Efstathiadis, 2003

Verspreide opklaringen, (only in Dutch): Peter van Ardenne

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Greek grappa

2011-09-02T01:25:00.000-07:00

(Tsipouro Dimino)

When you read about the history of alcoholic drinks like liquors, wine and beer, you may be amazed by the fact that many monasteries are part of their making. In monasteries in Belgium you still can taste beer, like the one that was invented by the Trappists in the seventeenth century.

It was the Greek god Dionysos that taught humans how to change grapes into wine. In the Middle Ages, wine making was mostly done in monasteries. God changed water into wine, so did the monks (well, they actually changed grapes into wine). Greek wines were famous worldwide and also produced by farmers, until the Turks invaded Greece in the fifteenth century. After that the farmers had to pay huge taxes and were unable keep their grape vines. However many monasteries were given privileges and so were able to keep on producing wine.

Of course the monks did not make alcohol to get pissed. Some saw it as a religious symbol – wine was considered to be the blood of Jesus Christ – and above all it was a healthy drink because it was made out of natural products. Some wines were even considered as medicine.

Monks used to be pretty busy people; they formed a closed community that had to produce its own food. So they worked the fields, brewed herb mixes to combat diseases and had all the time of the world to concoct new things; in earlier times monks looked for the secrets of life and were the scientists of the world. They also experimented with wine: an example being the liquor Chartreuse, made from 130 different herbs, which was created in a monastery close to Paris in the seventeenth century.

Much earlier, Greek monks had invented another drink through experimenting. Beginning in the first century they hacked monasteries out of the ground on the most eastern peninsula of Chalcidici (Macedonië), now renowned for its monastery empire Mount Athos. Wine from Athos was famous. In the fourteenth century a local monk used the ‘must’ that remained after the crushing of the grapes for wine to make another drink: tsipouro, called also tsikoudia (on Crete), raki (the Turkish name) or souma.

After ouzo, wine, retsina and beer, tsipouro is the most popular local alcoholic drink of Greece (whisky is more popular than tsipouro, but is not local). This strong beverage (around 40% alcohol) is best compared with Italian grappa. When the grapes are crushed, stems, skins and stones remain. This substance is put into kettles together with some wine and herbs and after several distillations it gives a clear liquid that may seem to look like ouzo but is quite different.

The secret of tsipouri is to be found in the herbs and everybody uses different ones. In some regions they add saffron, giving the liquid a bright yellow colour, similar to the yellow Chartreuse, although this is quite different. In other tsipouro’s they add aniseed and/or fennel, which creates anethole in the drink, meaning that when you add water it will turn white — just like ouzo, but a different drink. What they call raki in Turkey is often thought of as ouzo, but this is a tsipouro with aniseed and/or fennel.

Tsipouro is also called the poor brother of wine, because it is made with bi-products of wine making. When the recipe of tsipouro was presented to the world, it was mostly poor people and farmers producing and consuming it because the ‘must’, the herbs and the wood to keep the fire going under the distillation kettle did not cost any money. It was mostly made in an amateurish way in copper kettles and commerce in small communities was allowed. In 1883 the first taxes were imposed on alcoholic drinks. In 1896 the first licenses for tsipouri were issued. In 1989 tsipouro came under the European distillation laws and today it’s an official Greek product.

It is thanks to these laws that tsipouro has grown into a quality product. But, as you can imagine, there remained farmers who, in their barns, secretly stoked tsipouro according to their grandfathers’ recipe. And even now when visiting a Greek family, after dinner there might suddenly appear on the table a mysterious bottle with home made tsipouro.

It is said that tsipouro (provided that you drink moderately and eat some mezedes) never gives a hangover. I have to admit that I once drunk so much home-made tsipouro that I fell pretty ill. So for a long time I stayed away from this drink because even the smell made me sick. But now I have tasted another product of the island: the tsipouro Dimino, made in Mytilini — and I was pretty happy drinking it. Sometimes grappas and tsipouros have a flat taste, like you are drinking just alcohol, but Dimino has a full taste of autumnal fruits and herbs. Dimino is the only tsipouro officially produced on Lesvos.

Since the crisis in Greece, prices have risen speedily. In the eight years since I came here, prices for alcoholic drinks have nearly doubled or tripled. The monasteries no longer produce wine, the church now is brewing dinners for the fast growing population group that cannot afford Greek life anymore.

Luckily, here on the island, not many people need to knock on the monasteries’ doors for food. Most of them have their own garden — hence their own food. Many people also make their own wines. And even though Dimino is a very good quality tsipouro, I won’t surprised, if, during the coming grape harvest, the illegal distilleries will be taken out of hiding again.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

Smitaki @ 2011

The Greek monsoon

2011-08-25T00:21:00.000-07:00

(The lighthouse and unknown building in Hiyarlik Koyu, Turkey)

The monsoon is a wind that returns each year and is the announcement of the change of a season. When I think about a monsoon, I immediately see images from India or someother southeastern country where long and heavy rainfalls make humans and animals thoroughly wet and changes their world to a huge mud pool.

Here on the Greek islands we also have a yearly wind (sometimes called a monsoon) ¬ the meltemi, which the ancient Greeks used to call the Etesian winds. However, this northern wind that can blow over the Aegean from May to September is dry and brings not a drop of rain.

The Etesians are due to low pressure above Asia and high pressure above the Azores. The heat above Turkey reinforces this tension and creates the meltemi that can blow for days on end with a force from 6 to 8 Beaufort.

The ancient Greeks used to have numerous Gods who were responsible for the winds. They were regularly asked for help. When the island of Kea, was struck by a severe heat wave that made all crops die, the ancients accused the dogstar Sirius for this evil. This shiny big star is at its clearest during the Dogdays in July and August. Zeus decided to help out and sent the Etesian winds to cool the island for forty days. This brought about a new cult dedicated to begging for the yearly return of the Etesian winds.

Forty days? I would go crazy! In India people look forward to the monsoon. Equally the Greeks wait for their monsoon, because this wind is seen as a blessing: it chases away the heat and lowers the humidity.

Some days ago the meltemi came and I wonder who invited him, because we were not suffering from a heat wave. It was nicely warm. Of course, a day with a meltemi blowing can be a refreshing change from the usual heat — but please, not for so many days! After just one day, I am already a bit itchy because of the draught in the house. Even with the meltemi blowing the house becomes a furnace if you close all windows and doors; so you need to open them all, which means turning your house into a playground for the wind.

The Etesian winds are also fairly unpredictable. It slows down whenever it wants. Whilst there are some people who say that it always dies down in the night; I got blown out of my bed for several nights. On the sea it brings foam to the waves and in the water it shuffles the loose seaweed into moving clouds, which can be upsetting when you swim. Just when you think that the sea has calmed down and you go down to the beach, the waves start climbing again, the seaweed rises from the bottom and you have to think twice about entering the water. Another habit of the meltemi is to cool off the sea.

One advantage of the meltemi is that it clears the air. Sometimes during heat waves visability can become so bad, due to the humidity, that Turkey, which is opposite Lesvos, disappears completely from sight. But, when the meltemi sweeps through the air, you can start to see people lying on the beach in Turkey. Well, I admit that, is a little exaggerated; but you can clearly see the buildings in Turkey.

Just opposite Eftalou you can see a slim white tower. I thought that this was a minaret, but viewing the Turkish coast by Google Earth I learned that this is a lighthouse (if the picture is right). When the meltemi had chased away the hot muggy air, I discovered that behind this lighthouse there appeared another tower, a brown building covered in something red, twice as high and maybe three times wider than the lighthouse. I am intrigued because I cannot imagine why they built such a tower just behind (or beside) a pretty lighthouse. I think this mysterious building is at Hiyarlik Koyu, somewhere between Assos (Behramkale) and Koyunevi. Does anybody know what they are building there?

On the sea, when the waves appear with their white manes, sometimes you see the sail of a kitesurfer racing past. Surfers have the time of their lives during the meltemi. Other sailors are not that happy with this kind of weather; ferries sometimes have to stay in the harbour and it’s a treacherous time for sailing.

The meltemi announces the change of season, which makes me a little sad because it means that the summer is beginning to end. The dry leaves that fall because of the heat are the messengers and they dance in the wind, impatient to welcome the autumn. But we still have some summer weeks to go and it is not yet clear for how long the meltemi will rattle doors and windows. At least most people are happy that August is no longer ruled by the heat wave. So I’d better stop complaining.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

The miraculous world of Mary

2011-08-14T23:53:00.000-07:00

(Interior of the Maria Vrefokratousa church in Ayasos)

On Monday August 15 it will be Maria Assumption. After Easter this is the biggest holiday in Greece: when Maria will be taken into heaven. It is said that Maria spent the last years of her life in Ephesus, across the Aegean in Turkey, just opposite Samos. The Virgin Maria had been taken there from Jerusalem, by the apostle John, in order to escape the prosecutions of Christians.

On a hill, just beside a source John built her a house. Maria died after nine years living in Ephesus. The apostles buried her coffin in a cave a few kilometres from her house. St. Thomas however couldn’t make it on time for the funeral and when he did arrive, they all returned to the cave. Opening the coffin so that St. Thomas could have a proper goodbye it was revealed that Maria’s body was gone, although the coffin had been properly locked before opening: Maria had been taken to Heaven.

This is the story of the German nun Anna Katherina Emmerich
(1774 – 1824) who had, during her life, experienced plenty of visions from the lives of Jesus and Mary. When, at the end of her life, she became seriously ill there were few people she allowed around her. One of them was the German poet Clemens Brentano who wrote down Emmerich’s stories and later published them.

This is how curious people started to look for the house of Maria, that Emmerich had described so clearly, in the surroundings of Ephesus. In 1881 a priest from Paris found the location, but nobody believed he had found the house of Mary. Ten years later a group of people found the same location and this time they were believed. It was the ruins of an old monastery, with behind a path leading to the top of a mountain, a little stream passing by and a source. It is amazing to think that a German woman, who had never been there, had described this place so accurately. Later scientists revealed that under the remains of the monastery from the 6th – 7th century, there were indeed walls from the first century. Today the house of Maria has been rebuilt and it is a very popular place of pilgrimage.

Greece’s number one place for Maria pilgrimages on the island of Tinos – say the Lourdes of Greece – is also connected to a story from a nun who had a vision. The nun Pelagia was aged only fifteen in 1822 when Mary told her where to find an icon. So people went digging in the field she described and at the second try they indeed found an old icon, which is said to have been made by the evangelist Lucas. It has been attributed with so many miracles, curing people from illnesses, that the church Our Lady of Tinos (Panagía Evangelístria) was built to house the icon. It now attracts thousands of pilgrims. Even today many people pray to Maria to be cured and in return they promise to travel to her church on their knees, or even rolling or on their stomach..

Lesvos has two pilgrims centres dedicated to Maria: the
Maria Vrefokratousa church in Ayasos and the Maria Glikofiloussa church in Petra. The story of the icon in the church on the rock in Petra says that the icon belonged to a fisherman who always took it with him. In a rough sea the icon was lost. Once ashore, the fisherman saw a tiny light glowing on a huge rock and there he found his icon. He took the icon back to sea and again the icon got lost. When he found the icon for the second time on the huge rock, he realised that he had to build a church and leave the icon there. The church is from the seventeenth century and was rebuilt in 1840.

Another miraculous story is that of the Church of Lagouvarda in Markopoulo on the island of Kefalonia (Cephalonia). Each year in the first weeks of August this church is visited by snakes! When the people come to honour Mary during the 14th and 15th of August, the little snakes not only crawl around the icons, but are also passed from hand to hand by the believers. When Assumption Day is over, the snakes disappear as quickly as they came. These snakes belong to the Catsnake family (Telescopus fallax ) and are said to bring luck. Their non-appearance in the church during two years was seen as a bad omen: in 1940 when the island was occupied by the Italians during World War II and in 1953, in the midst of August when serious earthquakes destroyed large parts of the villages on the island.

It is another story involving nuns explaining these odd visitors. Once a monastery with nuns in Markopoulo was besieged by pirates. The nuns were very scared and they prayed to the Holy Mary saying that they preferred to be changed into snakes rather than fall into the hands of the pirates. And so it happened. When the pirates finally penetrated the monastery they were met by hundreds of snakes and they fled as fast as they could, leaving the monastery unharmed.

So here in Greece people keep occupied with Mary and her miracles during the month of August; the faithfull flood all the different places of pilgrimage, such as Agiasos and Petra, where it’s so busy you wouldn’t think there is a crisis going on.

I myself am not such a big believer, but I have to thank Mary on my bare knees for bringing back my dog Humpedumpy. We had to take her to the vet in Mytilini and when she arrived in the city she panicked, got off her collar and ran away. For ten days she was lost in the big city. Then a friend phoned me saying that she had seen the dog walking in a busy street outside of Mytilini where I was later able to pick her up. In the meantime my beloved Labrador Black Jack has died after a short illness but I guess no miracle can be produced to bring him back.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki

Singing lessons

2011-08-05T12:25:00.000-07:00

(Cicadas; photo from internet)

In summer, on Greek islands like Lesvos, the number of inhabitants doubles or even triples. This results in more noise in the streets. The holidaying youth have all the time in the world to go around on their noisy motorbikes, car rental companies put hundreds of cars on the roads, cabs race up and down the streets (unless they are striking as they have these last three weeks) and Greeks from the mainland fill up the summer car parks.

Not only the heat, but also this noise makes living in the city in the summer unenviable. Better to live in nature. But even there the summer months can be pretty noisy. In a way nature is a cacophony of sounds, especially in summer, when the cicadas use the hot air to sing loudly.

This week I wanted to write about these noisy guys and when I started to search the internet for more information I fell upon the column Singing Cicadas of the Muses of Pieria written by Nina Fotiadou
(Zingende cicaden van de Muzen van Pieria). She has written everything I wanted to tell you about the cicadas, so there’s no use for me to write that column again. Since her piece is only available in Dutch, I refer you to the Wikipedia page about Cicadas.

In any case, I would not have been able to write as entertaining a story as Nina Fotiadou did, because amongst other things she writes how the muses of Pieria, living on Mount Olympos close to the Greek Gods, created the cicadas. But Lesvos is far away from that sacred mountain in the mainland Greece and, as far as I know, no muses are living here creating crickets. Oops, now I have made a mistake: I mean cicadas!

Crickets and cicadas are often confused. So the first thing I did when starting to write about them was to observe which of these noisy guys I have here at my house. Very clearly they are cicadas. Not only are they far more loud than crickets, they also produce their music quite differently. They use their muscles to vibrate plates on their bodies, whilst the cricket produces his music by moving his wings along a kind of plate on his legs; these last movements are called stridulation.

Can you believe that Crickets and cicadas were popular pets in ancient times? When I was young I learned that the emperors of China used to have nightingales as pets, but they also had crickets and cicadas for their entertainment. Although I can’t imagine that while drinking a cup of tea you could possibly enjoy the sound of a cicada. Your eardrums start shaking as soon as you approach such an insect.

Crickets make a much softer noise that sounds more lovely to the ears. And to think that all those historians would mix up crickets and cicadas! Listen to this conversation between crickets and cicadas and when the cicada comes in at the second line, you will immediately recognize which insect is dominating the conversation: Crickets & Cicades Conversation. My ears are still hurting from listening to them over the computer!

Many stories from Greek history however did mix up crickets and cicadas, for example the story by Aesop about the Ant and the Cicada. This fable occasionally even named a third insect often confused with a cricket or a cicada: the Ant and the Grasshopper. I was amazed to learn that some grasshoppers also sing. This is not the eating sound they produce when they attack those tasty green leaves: some grasshoppers also know how to stridulate. However their sound is much less loud than that of the crickets and cicadas.

While writing this I am trying to distinguish the different sounds in the ongoing concert in my garden: do I hear a cricket or a cicada and are there some grasshoppers singing with them? This morning there is a little breeze from the sea cooling off the heat wave and the insects sing less. The warmer it is, the louder they are. I feel is unfair because when we humans, exhausted by the heat and after a healthy lunch, wish to have a little siesta in the afternoon, it is right at that hottest part of the day, that the cicadas get ready to play the highlight of their daily concert. And believe me, trying to sleep in a hammock hanging between two trees that are occupied by cicadas is no option at all.

The loudness of their music is related to the temperature. In America there is a cricket (snowy tree cricket) that you can use to calculate the temperature in Fahrenheit: Dolbear’s law. You just add 40 to the times the cricket chirps in 14 seconds. Well, I have my own law: when the cicadas cry so loud that you can’t understand any conversation, the temperature is well over 30o C. Warning: Julie’s law is not scientifically proven.

In the evening you are not as bothered by their singing. But then you are attacked by hundreds of noiseless moths and sometimes by strange flying green triangles that pass with a sound of a small jet. This is the southern stinking bug (Nezara viridula) of which there are plenty here thanks to the growing of vegetables in the neighbourhood. They just love vegetables. They make short flights and during those short distances they open their motors full.

I was once bothered by an insect that looked like one of those remote- controlled toy helicopters. It suddenly hung before my nose, humming with little flying movements, as if there were children hidden in the bushes piloting it and amusing the whole company sitting around the table. I only saw this flying insect with propellers once and now, when I try to remember what it looked like, I only see a small helicopter.

When you start to pay attention to all these insects you enter an amazing world full of bright colours, futuristic formed wings, antennae, shields and electronic sounding music. When you are suffering from a heat wave you can easily be disturbed by these harsh noises. But other than that, here we have free daily concerts that make you feel like a Chinese emperor enjoying the sound of his singing pets. The summer brings a wonderful world of strange musicians.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Art to eat

2011-07-27T06:56:00.000-07:00

My father always said that I should not play with my food. In France they consider bread as holy and you are not supposed to play with it. So I never play with the food on my plate. But I have other ways to play with food.

Here in Greece, I prefer to eat the vegetables of the season (there is hardly any other choice). So when the summer advances and the heat boils parts of your brain and I arrive at the vegetable shop I sometimes get mad about the small choice: tomatoes, cucumbers, aubergines, paprika, zucchini, onions, potatoes: those are the vegetables of the season.

I have to admit that I have given up Greek cooking. I have never understood how the Greeks know how to turn such simple ingredients into five star dishes. I have decided that in my kitchen it is more fun to play with those local ingredients than to labour to become a Greek cook.

For example, I love an African couscous and the only ingredient not available on the island is the couscous itself (those little wheatflour grains). You can import it from abroad or buy it at the Alpha Vita in Mytilini. But be careful what you buy: the Greeks have now discovered couscous as well, or let’s say they have produced something they call couscous; but it’s very tiny pasta balls that has a totally different property than the real thing – juice-loving little grains made out of wheatflour. Nor can you get merguez sausages on the island; but you can bake the local home made sausages with lots of hot paprika powder, which gives an inkling of the taste of merguez. Other specific ingredients for a couscous dish are tomatoes, chickpeas, mint, lamb meat which are all readily available during a Greek summer.

Another favourite dish is a Spanish paella and all the ingredients, except again for the sausages (a paella has hot chorizo sausage), are available. If you wish to make a paella with shellfish, you have to wait for the winter when they come fresh from the Bay of Kalloni. But with frozen shrimps (the fresh ones also come only during the winter), octopus and other fresh fish you can make a lovely paella. Saffron comes mostly from Kozani, the region in Greece where saffron crocuses are grown on large scale. The Greeks also make rice dishes with shellfish, but they keep it simple: just rice cooked in the cooking juice of the shellfish.

I also experiment with somewhat simpler dishes. For example, when you make a cream out of feta, cheese spread and other local cheeses (like ladotiri or graviera) you get a tasty dip which you serve with slices of cucumber. You can also spread the cream on grilled slices of aubergine. You roll them up, pin them together with a tooth pick and you’ll have a wonderful snack. And have you ever served feta with quince jelly, oriental fig confiture? Or you can serve it, as the French do, with some of their goat’s cheese, — just aroused with some honey and sprinkled with thyme? And then there are those Italian courgette pancakes made with grated courgette, eggs, garlic and basil.

Greeks will not approve when I will tell them about the fish terrine that I made recently with the fish that was supposed to be used for a fish soup. Greeks don’t like to mash their food and so a fish remains whole until it ends up on your plate (except of course for those in the soup). But when there’s a heat wave, like we have at the moment, you don’t fancy soup, so — a fresh fish terrine is a welcome change of food.

And, during this summer heat, how about a delicious icecold Spanish gazpacho (tomato soup)? I was once served a very tasty cold Greek yoghurt-cucumber soup by a friend who got the recipe from his mother who lives in Kozani. So the Greeks know a cold soup. But best cold soup you can get at the moment in Molyvos is the famous and incredible lovely carrot soup from the restaurant Majorani.

But what to do with all those melons? For the honeydew melons there is the old standby recipe of slices of melon with smoked ham. But a good ham (unless imported), is difficult to find here on the island, just like paté. You only get those farmers’ sausages, which are lovely, but why can’t they produce smoked hams, like they do on Cyprus?

A few years ago, I wrote about how, every summer, everybody is confronted with enormous amounts of water melon. You can even grill them: grilled watermelon. A while ago I saw an even better use for a watermelon: water melon art. I was flabbergasted by the beautiful objects they carved out of the fruit. On YouTube you will find plenty of instructive films on how to make them: for example – carving roses. And when you spoil one, you can eat it yourself!

It would be a super attraction for the tourists on Lesvos. The island does not have enough sandy beaches to organize a sandcastle contest. Nor does it have the right climate to build huge palaces out of ice. But Lesvos has mountains of watermelons and with them you can create large fields of flowers. If on Rhodes they can dance the sirtaki with 2000 persons, why can we not change 2000 watermelons into a piece of art?

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Fire risks

2011-07-22T23:46:00.000-07:00

(Fire close to Petra)

One of Europe’s biggest catastrophes in the last century unfolded not too far from Lesvos: the destruction of Smyrna (today Izmir). This city used to be the richest town of the Ottoman Empire and was the home to Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, English, French, Italians, Americans and so on. After World War I, Kemal Atatürk saw it as his duty to free Turkey from the plans of West-Europe and America to reduce the mighty Ottoman Empire to the size of Anatolia. There was also the question of who would become master of Smyrna. This political bickering turned out to be disastrous for the inhabitants of Smyrna. For years, there had already been fighting in Turkey, but the people of Smyrna thought they were too powerful to be touched. Only when the defeated Greek army started to pour into their city, followed by tens of thousands of refugees and finally the army of Atatürk, did they realize that they also were in danger. On September 13th1922 the final catastrophe, that would end the easy living at Smyrna, started when houses were set on fire and flames slowly made their way through the various quarters, on to the quay, where half a million refugees got trapped between a hell of fire and Turkish soldiers eager to kill.

As it happens, a fleet of ships from international powers was moored just outside the city in the Bay of Smyrna. But they were only there to save their own nationals and, not wanting to get involved in the Turkish conflict, they did nothing to prevent this humanitarian disaster. It was due to the American Asa Jennings, a clerk at the YMCA in Smyrna, that hundreds of thousands of people were able to escape the hell. He personally made a deal with Atatürk, the Americans and the Greeks that under the American flag, a fleet of Greek ships moored in Mytilini’s harbour were allowed to evacuate the people.

The book Paradise Lost by Giles Milton reports the tales of witnesses and diaries from that time. It tells about the tolerant city, its beauty, the rich dynasties that lived as though in paradise, as well as the ongoing wars and political chaos, but especially about this incredible hell that ended everything.

Lesvos in this history was just a springboard to Smyrna, for the Greek army and later for the evacuations. Of course the island in that time became engulfed with refugees (not only from Smyrna) who lost everything. Many people here on Lesvos have their roots ‘at the other side’, in what once was the Ottoman Empire.

Lesvos too has also lost places to fires. During the building of the big church in Agiasos in 1812 the church went on fire as did a part of the village. And maybe God was not so happy, because sixty-five years later the newly rebuilt church and the entire village got destroyed by another fire.

Megalochori, the big village above Plomari, was destroyed three times by fire in the 19th century and has earned the name Kameno Chori (burned village). One or two of the fires had been set by the pirates. When the pirates had finally been chased away from the Aegean Sea, the inhabitants left their fire-prone village to found a new city at the seaside: Plomari. And that is why Mechalochori is sometimes called Old Plomari.

Petra has also not been lucky. When, in 1912, the island was freed, the withdrawing Ottoman army plundered the houses, murdered civilians and set fire to the village.

Nearly a century later the danger of fire is again high on the island. It is not that cities and villages are in danger, but, for about four years, there seem to be an arsonist active in the region of Molyvos. He causes sleepless nights to many inhabitants; he starts his work when the children’s summer holidays start and the fires stop when the children go back to school. He attacks only the region between the Molyvos-Vavios road and Petra. So far this summer there have been six fires.

The third fire was alarmingly big and started near the Hotel Molyvos Castle, on the Molyvos–Petra road and raged quickly over the mountains to Petra in the direction of Stipsi. Thanks to a changing wind and its swimming pool the hotel was spared. As was Hotel Panorama in Petra where the fire was miraculously stopped by the walls that enclose the hotel. There was huge panic but the flames were kept outside of the hotel. The three last fires were all in the same afternoon, seemingly the pyromaniac is playing with the firefighters.

In Washington D.C. it took thirty years to catch the arsonist Thomas Sweat who set fire to hundreds of houses, just to trigger his sexual fantasies. The best known arsonist of America is John Orr, who was an arson investigator himself. He published a book about pyromania, but lit ten thousand fires in the region of San Francisco (also it seems to stimulate his sexual fantasies).

It is not certain that the region here has a pyromaniac. He has not yet been caught— if it is a ‘he’ (female arsonists are very rare). Nor indeed do we know if there is not more than one person involved. He probably does not aim to cause a humanitarian disaster like in Smyrna, as he has avoided the villages. Until now, he has only caused black charred landscapes; but his fires are coming closer to hotels and houses. Civilians and firefighters are extremely alert these days — so let’s hope he get caught before worse things happen.

(With thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Dance the night away

2011-07-12T03:43:00.000-07:00

I finally have the feeling that summer has arrived: temperatures are climbing above 30°C and from the beach children’s noisy voices beam through the neighbourhood. It’s the time when people on the beach and the streets take up their summer mood: racing taxi’s and mopeds.

Crisis or not, Greeks always enjoy summer. Especially the nights when work has been done and the afternoon heat has passed away. Even though the municipality does not have too much money, it has presented a reasonable cultural summer program, although most events are taking place in the capital Mytilini. Here in the north we have to make do with a music performance of Nick Tsirigotis on the main square of Petra (21.00 on July 18) and on August 6th there is music and dance from the Ionian Islands in the castle of Molyvos. On August 7th in the same location there will be a children’s event called The princess and the frog (21.00). In addition to the famous Sardine Festival on August 6th and 7th in Skala Kalloni, Kalloni has some concerts and Plomari and Polichnitos have both one event. However for all other music and dance events you have to travel to Mytilini.

Maybe you are curious about the timing of the childrens’ event – nine o’clock in the evening – that’s because, in the summer, Greek children don’t go to bed early. They sleep in the afternoon when it’s so hot and they only go to the beach about six or seven o’clock. And when the parents go out for dinner much later, they take the kids along. In wintertime I have also been amazed about the late bedtime for children. More than once I have seen movies for children programmed very late on television. I wonder if Greek children ever go to bed early.

Here in the north we don’t have to be too sad about the meagre municipal cultural program. Besides the many local festivals and the celebration of the Asumption of Mary on August 15th, there are several restaurants which hire musicians to light up the hot summer nights. In any case, even without planned dance events, you will often find dancing because Greeks love to dance.

Dances of Lesvos have been influenced by history. The Karsilamas is a dance that came with the refugees from the East and this dance is now popular in both Turkey and on Lesvos. Karsilama means face to face and that is why the Karsilamas has to be danced by two people. It is also called ksila (χιλα), which means wood.

I prefer to watch an Ayvaliotikos Zeybekikos, another popular dance on Lesvos which I think is more dramatic. The name comes from Ayvalik, the village in Turkey opposite Lesvos, meaning that this dance also came from the other side. In this dance normally one person performs before a group.

It is pretty amusing to surf around on YouTube in order to see what little movies have been made of these and other Greek dances. I even found some instruction movies to teach you how to dance; but the instructions for how to dance the Karsilamas were too poor to be taken seriously. Just take a look at Music on Lesvos Island, and you will see that these dances are a little bit more complicated than just one, two, three, four.

However you can win prizes even though you don’t know all the steps to a Greek dance. This happened to father and son Stavros Flatley during the popular television program Britains got talent in 2009. Due to their great Greek charm and without too many Greek dancing steps they reached the final of the competition and became fourth.

In western European media Greeks are now said to be ouzo boozing lazy people, stopping work when they reach the age of fifty. People who visit Greece know that this picture is totally wrong. Especially in the summer season, old and young folks work like hell in order to save for the winter months when there is less work to be found. But late in the evenings, when a glass of ouzo may well appear on the table, the Greeks throw their tiredness into the air and not only drink but also dance the night away. Local tavernas and village festivals provide welcome opportunities to forget their worries. The bull festival in Aya Paraskevi has already passed but have a look at this man who wanted to dance but could not separate himself from his horse: a horse dance. And what do you do when you don’t want to go home after the Sardines Festival? You just continue to dance an improvised Karsilamas in front of the harbour.

Or, if want to get into the papers with your Greek dancing — then you have to go to Rhodes where, in Kremasti, on July 31, they will try to enter the Guiness Book of Records by having 2000 people dance the famous sirtaki dance. This dance is also called Zorba’s Dance. That’s because this dance was created during the filming of the famous movie Zorba the Greek where Anthony Quinn had the memorable leading role. The steps of traditional dances such as the hasapiko or the syrtos were too difficult for Quinn so they created a new dance for him with the music of Mikis Theodorakis. And that is why the most famous Greek dance is no older than 1964, when this movie came out and was an instant worldwide hit.

If you don’t fancy any Greek traditional dance, then you should come to Lesvos where from July 14 to 17 there is going to be a tango festival in Molyvos. What better than to do a tango under a bright moon to music of famous deejays? During the daytime there will be workshops and dance demonstrations by famous tango dancers.

Summer heat has arrived, along with the languorous nights. What more can you do than dance the night away?

(With thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Greece

2011-07-04T00:51:00.000-07:00

(Cherries)

There are days that I could wring the necks of some Greeks. This is because of a huge birthday party we had, with many friends and family coming to the island – with some of them telling me pretty upsetting stories about their hotel owner or a car hire company. I had to do my very best to tell them that not all Greeks are like this.

Greece who is dancing a dangerous tango with bankruptcy cannot afford to loose tourists. Tourism is the economic segment that at least brings some money to the empty treasury of the state. Here on the island there are some entrepreneurs who are doing everything in order to save their business from Greek ruination. But some are not.

It is a disservice when a Greek that give you a warm welcome when you arrive, but then bluntly says that your reserved room has been taken and you have to make-do with a room in some backyard hotel – or when arriving at the airport your reserved car for five persons turns out to be a small car for four persons – or in a row of several cars the police decide that your rental car is the only one wrongly parked and gives you a ticket. Hotel owners had the whole winter to do some rebuilding, but some only started to build when the first summer guests arrived; as if all that construction noise is an attraction for the guests who came to enjoy quietness! These are not very friendly welcomes for the visitors to this island. I sometimes ask myself what people here are doing to manage their hotels or car rentals agencies. It is clear that some of them really are in need of a good course in customer service.

However these are only small incidents and when the victims of such a welcome recover from their first fright, they discover that Greeks are by nature hospitable and warm people. Although I must say that the Greek small entrepreneurs, like the hotel and restaurant owners and car renters of this island are in a difficult position because ¬– to say it simply ¬¬– together with the Greek lower and middle classes they have to compensate for all the unpaid taxes of the rich.

So, it’s no wonder that in Athens they take to the streets and demonstrate, so you’d better not venture these days to Syntagma Square or near the parliaments buildings of Athens.

On Lesvos there is nothing to be seen of this unrest – even though the general strikes have caused some delay for a plane or two and we have had some small power cuts. Although the Greeks here are a little sad – life is becoming more and more expensive and nobody knows what is going to happen to their country – but life continues as usual. As in other summers, charter flights disposit hundreds of tourists on the island who come to enjoy sun, sea and the countryside.

Crisis or not, the earth gives what she has always given – vegetables and fruit; a little late, because of the cool weather – but plenty and not more expensive. The fruit season has started and the trees are full of apricots, cherries, mulberries and prunes. The first cucumbers, zucchinis, tomatoes and eggplants have been harvested, while the bean season has already finished. For the tourists life on the island seems to be like a cloudless sky.

However, it seems as if the weather is participating on the side of the protesters. Clouds gather in the sky and, more than once, they have formed a front, looking like riot police with shields, to block off the sun. Yesterday it poured cats and dogs in some places on the island and the weather forecast for tomorrow also predicts some rain. Mornings and evenings can be rather cool and a jacket is indispensable when you go out for dinner. I am still sleeping under a thick duvet in the night, which is unheard of for a Greek summer night in July.

So there are very comfortable temperatures here in Greece, especially for the tourists who experienced extremely hot weather in their own countries like Holland and Germany and have come to cool off in Greece!

Until now summer has been strangely cool and full of hot debating. Will you help the Greeks? Come and have your holiday in Greece. I am sure you will not regret it because people who spend their holidays here always return home very satisfied, even though they might have met a person who forgot how to behave like a ‘hospitable Greek’.

(If you are in doubt about Lesvos being nice enough for your holiday, order the book Scatterlight Donkeys & Foxballs Ice Cream and get seduced by the stories and the pictures of this beautiful island.)

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Surprising waste

2011-06-08T06:24:00.000-07:00

(The 'open air museum' near Old Andissa)

Nature on Lesvos is still very green, although summer is seriously colouring the landscape yellow. In quite another way, the island is slowly greening: the landscape is being cleared of illegal dumps and the recycling of waste is starting.

This spring the environmental group Lesvos go Green distributed flyers telling us what to do with the waste that can be recycled (batteries, electrics and electronic appliances, cooking and frying oil, light bulbs, old cars and so on). You may have to search a little to find the different containers, but they are here and in this way Lesvos is becoming a greener island.

Recycling Aegean came in 2001 to Mytilini and is now a huge recycling-plant. Here old iron, metal, tires, cars and packaging materials find a new life. Some 1300 tons of metal, 10 tons of wire, 40 tons of batteries, 40 tons of paper (mainly books) and 30 tons of aluminium packaging are gathered annually.

There is also a second recycling firm in Mytilini. But having different possibilities of recycling does not mean that the illegal dumping places on the island will disappear. The question is how all this waste material will reach the plants. There are some traders like the gypsies who gather old iron. But the average inhabitant of Lesvos doesn’t take his recycling items to Mytilini every week (although I have heard people say that they take their empty bottles to Mytllini because there are containers where you can dump them). I do hope that with better information – like the flyer from Lesvos go Green – more recycling will be done.

Apart from the waste to be recycled the normal rubbish also forms a problem. Written in 2009, the essay Moving Up the EU Waste Hierarchy in Remote Area, Exploring the Case of Lesvos Island, Greece written by Faikham Harnnarong predicted what is now going on. The central refuse plant of the island has been opened somewhere in the mountains between Mytilini and Mandamados. The problem now is how the local rubbish vans can get there, because those from Molyvos (and those of other faraway districts like Plomari, Polychnitos and Sigri) cannot drive each day up and down on a three hour journey. The crisis is not making things easier because, of course, there is no money to buy bigger trucks, for more petrol (the prices of petrol is rising by the week) or to pay more workers. So in the faraway regions (like here in the north) we have a huge problem. The local dumps are closed and now where can we go with the rubbish?

In Molyvos they found a solution, but already lots of people are protesting. In the municipal car park, a little outside of the village, but where people also live, they installed huge containers that each day are filled with rubbish. The containers were meant to be taken to the central refuse plant every second day, but because of the crisis this is not happening, so now the rubbish is piling up, causing a terrible stink and can be a danger to public health.

The village of Petra is also having problems with waste. As many public servants have not been paid for months sometimes they just do not collect the rubbish. Last weekend I saw the army coming down to the village in order to clean the streets and beaches.

So the refuse problem is not an easy one to handle, even though there are recycling plants and a central waste plant on the island. Let just say this: there is the willingness to treat refuse according to European standards and they created the places to do it; we now only have to hope that the crisis will soon end in order to solve all these logistic problems.

When you drive from the beach at Kambos along the coast to Old Andissa, you are driving along a river where you will see tons of old iron. The company Recycling Aegean would be happy to receive all this recycling material: there are tens of old trucks and shovels that –cleaned and polished – would belong to a museum.

Lots of museums in Greece are closed now because the state can no longer pay the staff. However, this ‘open-air museum’ would involve no cost as it would not need any personnel (assuming the trucks are not cleaned and polished). As the trucks are on the public road, there is no way other than to drive through this ‘museum’ if you want to continue your travel. But my guess is that lots of car lovers will jump out of their cars in order to take photographs.

Let’s hope that the collectors of old cars do not decide to remove this organised scrap-iron park, because this ‘drive-in-open-air museum’ is just another nice surprise that shows how some Lesviot people are creative with rubbish.

(With thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Orchid Hunting

2011-06-02T08:03:00.000-07:00

(A 'rasta-orchid' or Comperia comperiana)

Orchids form the biggest flower family that we know on earth. Their 21.000 – 26.000 officially accepted different species twice outnumber the birds and four times outnumber the mammals. Their beauty is recognized worldwide but when we look at their history, it seems that orchids are very dangerous flowers because they make many an orchid collector crazy. Collecting orchids can be a dangerous business.

When the first Asian orchids came to Europe during Victorian times (19th century) people were so enthusiastic that an orchid fever arose that killed several people. Europeans were sent deep into the unknown jungles of Borneo, Colombia or Peru in order to collect new species of orchids and to ship them back to Europe. During these perilous travels orchid hunters drowned in wild flowing rivers, were killed or eaten by cannibals, had lethal bites from dangerous snakes or died from malaria and other tropical diseases. Even in the 20st century people paid with their lives for their passion: around 1900 a group of eight orchid hunters left for the Philippines. One got eaten by a tiger, another was doused with cooking oil and burned alive, five just disappeared but the one survivor returned to Europe with 7000 species! Little decades later a group was taken hostage by natives in Papua New Guinea and some of them were beheaded before a rescue team could save the rest.

The stories of the surviving orchid hunters could be horrific. If they were not killed themselves they at least were witness to local wars with barbaric rituals and tortures or they might find a village full of breathtakingly beautiful orchids, that however smelled so bad that you even could not approach them.

Orchid hunters were not a kind people. They fought with each other, they burned down whole areas where they found precious orchids or they destroyed all they could not take with them; they caused huge damage so that their competitors could not find what they had discovered. It is even said that when the boxes with orchids were ready to be put on the ships to Europe they would pee on those of their competitors so that the flowers would not survey the journey. Of course during these sea journeys whole bunches of precious orchids got lost. The exotic flowers were often not good seafarers, ships were sunk or burned out.

Orchid hunters still exist and because the Asian orchids are most precious commercially, it is they that are collected by the most crazy people. The book Orchid fever of Eric Hansen gives an entertaining vision of how eccentric this orchid world of crazy people is.

In Greece where you can find some 200 species, the orchid hunters are a more friendly lot. In Greece they do not look to sell or smuggle orchids; here they are peacefully shot by cameras and before there were camera’s they were drawn or dried for a herbarium.

Between 1879 and 1889, when at the other side of the world many an orchid hunter got lost in the jungles, here on Lesvos people also researched plants and amongst them orchids. Father C.A. Candargy and his son P.C. Candargy noted about 27 species on the island. I suppose the Candargy’s were not eaten by tigers or cannibals, but they disappeared without trace into history. Their herbarium is still lost and besides some minor biographical points the only thing that is left of them is their book Flore de l’Ile de Lesbos, published in 1889.

Now they say that here on Lesvos there are some 70 – 90 species, of which about ten are pretty rare and the search for them will bring you to the most unexpected and beautiful places.

I would become crazy from such an orchid mania; the island is so big that it is absolutely impossible to look everywhere on the island and most orchids like to hide in their natural environment so that even if they are big, you just look past them. On top of that, you have to be in the right place at the right time. It can be that they have just finished blossoming, or that they are still to come.

Last week I joined an orchid hunt in the region of Megalochori, where some rare species must be hiding. I am not that fanatical about these flowers, so I also look for other flowers. My fellow travellers promised me I would see flowering peonies. But they were just finished, just like some of the tulips and fritellaria. So, I was a little disappointed. Happily enough there were plenty of nice orchids and I got very lucky to find a rare Comperts orchid (Comperia comperiana), an orchid with crazy wild hairs, therefore I call it a rasta-orchid.

Not only orchid hunters are crazy, so are the flowers themselves. They do everything to seduce their environment: they develop the most crazy perfumes, colours and forms to attract insects to help with fertilizing.

A late summer – still a little cold, especially in the mornings and evenings – has one advantage: the whole of nature is late and tourists who know the island from previous May months may be surprised by the explosion of flowers and the near tropical green colour of the landscape right now.

For the orchid hunter it means that he has to reschedule his search: the species that flower in May are still not to be found due to the weather or you just do not find them, which can be pretty confusing. But it means that the orchid season, on Lesvos starting in February, can last until late in July.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Bean Blues

2011-05-25T00:25:00.000-07:00

(The broad bean plant has lovely flowers)

There is a day of spring and suddenly – zouffff – here is the summer. This year that day has come pretty late; in other years we have already had the first heat wave by now. But now, finally, here it is: the summer! Even though it has made its entrance very slowly.

As lovingly received as the summer, the first fresh beans of the year: koukias (broad beans) are being enthusiastically welcomed! Well, to be honest, they were already here many weeks before the summer.

Koukia (Vicia faba), used to be called favas and they were already being eaten some 6000BC in the Eastern Mediterranean. But they were also used for drawing lots to see who had to fight against who in the ancient Greek games of pankration (a combination of wrestling and boxing). In ancient Greece the seeds of the beans were used to ballot in the parliament: if you gave a black seed you did not agree, if you gave a white seed you did agree with a proposal.

The Greeks even had a special god for the beans: Kyamites. This rather mysterious God who looked after the bean harvest, had his temple on the road from Athens to Eleusis, a spot in Attica where they had celebrations for Demeter, goddess of the harvest.

The famous mathematician Pythagoras (570 – 495 BC) who came from Samos was also a philosopher and a reformer who had plenty of followers. Maybe this group was looked upon as a religious sect because they had serious rules to follow. They were forbidden to wear clothes made from animals, they were not allowed to pick up anything that fell from a table and they were not to eat beans, because Pythagoras thought that our ancestors lived in the beans. Maybe Pythagoras got that from Egypt where he had studied and where they believed that death travelled through the stem of the bean plants to the underworld. At the end of his life Pythagoras lived in Kronos (nowadays Corone in Italy). When the local people revolted against the Pythagorians and their revolutionary ideas, they mobbed their school and Pythagoras fled into a bean field. Here scientists disagree how Pythagoras died: some say that he walked slowly through the bean field because he was afraid to step on the beans and because of this he was caught and murdered. Others say he fled through the bean field, reached a temple where he hid and died from hunger.

In the novel Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture from the Greek writer Apostolos Doxiades we also find a combination of beans and mathematics. In the story, Uncle Petros tries to prove Goldbach’s conjecture, which is - that any even number greater than two is the sum of two primes. For this he used (dried) beans that he scattered across his living room floor. Even two years after that the book was published and both the English and the American publishers of the book promised a one million dollar prize for anybody who could solve Goldbach’s conjecture, the problem remains unsolved.

You could say that beans do not bring luck in mathematics¬ – but that they can make you happy ending your hunger. In Holland broad beans are far less popular than here in Greece. When they are fresh, like here on the island, they can be turned into a five star dish. You pick them when they are still small and you cook and serve them in their pods.

When the beans are really big, they are less wanted by the Greeks. But I know better - take those huge beans out of their pods and bake them with some bacon and cream. Another five star dish!

A popular Greek dish, mainly in wintertime, is fava, which can be green or yellow. You might think this is a dish made of broad beans, but it is not. Fava is made with split peas (and sometimes with chick peas). Which is strange, because I have never seen fresh peas on the island. But I have seen thousands of broad beans. And when the bean plants sigh with the weight of their heavy fruit, everybody invites you to come and pick the beans. Even though Greeks do not like their beans so big, it is a pity to let them languish on the land. Do the Greeks not know that with double shelled koukia you can make a marvellous kind of fava? You get them out of their pods, you cook them for about five minutes and then you mash them with some pepper, salt, mint, thyme, some lemon juice, olive oil, garlic and an finely chopped onion. You sprinkle them with cheese and put them in the oven long enough to melt the cheese: a tasty dish made with ‘fava’ beans not called fava.

Around mid summer, when the very last bean comes from the field everybody is greatly disappointed that the beans’ time has ended and that we have to wait another year for fresh koukia.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

The wineroads of Lesvos

2011-05-19T00:54:00.000-07:00

(Wines from Lesvos and one of Limnos)

Maybe you are tired of the old ruins from the far and glorious past of Greece. Modern Greece has more to offer than its monuments from ancient history. For example – wine. In ancient times, when temples and castles predominated the landscape, Lesvos was famous for its wine. Soil and climate were perfect for great wines like Pramian (see Winery).

Somehow during the turbulent events of the past and the many changes of rulers, the viticulture was lost here on the island; and the grapes were killed by the lethal disease Philloxera.

In the rest of Greece it was mainly the same story, and when the country stood up from the dust of the independence wars, the second world war and its civil war, it resumed serious viticulture.

Maybe Lesvos has remained a little behind the mainland, where today they make fabulous wines, winning more and more international prizes. If you follow all of the routes described in the website of ‘Wineroads of Northern Greece’ then you will have seen half of the country.

I do not know of any wine roads here on Lesvos, even not an ouzo road, Lesvos’ most known product. However more and more people here on the island do produce quality wine, like the winery Methymneos, that has put the name Lesvos back on the wine map.

About a year ago a new winery was created in Megolochori: Oenophoros, with its excellent red wine Daphnis & Chloë, that became my favourite wine. Last April they introduced a white wine under the same name as well as the red wine Makaras. I have not had a chance to drink these last two wines but I am looking forward to tasting them.

The wine roads on Lesvos are not that extended with only two vineyards existing here. But you have to realize that wine is made in nearly each village you pass, wines that never reach the shops because they are made for local consumption. They make a beautiful wine in Anemotia; each year I drink litres of a tasteful biological wine from Plomari and during very long evenings, I enjoy the strong wine from Lisvori without getting drunk. So, in a way, all roads of the island lead to those small local wineries.

Methymneos (http://www.methymneos.gr/en/index.html) is situated in the small village of Chidera. Drive through Skalochori to Vatoussa, a beautifull village with tall traditional houses and a small but interesting folkloric museum. At the end of Vatoussa is the turnoff towards Chidera. The winery is at the beginning of the village and they provide interesting tours through their building. But the winery is not the only place to visit in Chidera: it also has the only digital museum in Greece: that of Georgios Jacovidis.

Jacovidis (1853 – 1932) was born in Chidera, studied art in Smyrna (today Ismir), continued his study at the art school in Athens and finally mastered his art in Munich. Most of his paintings are of people and lots of children, in a style called German Realism. His paintings are to be seen worldwide in museums like the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery in Athens.

So, before you taste some wine at Methymneos, a visit to the digital museum is worthwhile. Works by Jacovidis are displayed digitally, and you can find facts around his work, his family and the time he lived, in an interactive way. It is a modern adventure in a traditional village.

Your wine road should not stop here in Chidera. You should go back to the main road and continue towards Andissa where you will pass the monastery of Perivoli. When the warden is present, in this now uninhabited monastery, you should not miss the opportunity to go into the church to admire the frescoes from the 16th century.

And now that this tour is becoming more a painting road than a wine road, you should drive another few kilometres where you will see – just before Andissa – the extension towards the small hamlet Tsithra, which is a small nearly deserted village, beautifully hidden in lush greenery, where you will find an Agios Nicholaos church also containing very old frescoes. The times I was there the lady holding the key of the church had always ‘just’ gone away. But I am sure you will be more lucky. After that I leave it up to you if you continue for a coffee to the marketplace of Andissa or to have a fresh dive into the sea at Gavathas.

The wine road towards the wine of Megalochori is not that romantic because it leads towards Mytilini where the actual winery is, a modern building where traces of old history can be found, just across from the supermarket Lidl. The vineyards of Oenophoros however are in Megalochori, and they have vineyards in Karionas, Eresos and Kalloni.

So if you want to sniff a little at the air and earth where Daphnis & Chloë comes form, the nicest way to Megalochori goes through the villages Ambeliko and Akrasi. Ambeliko is built against a steep mountain slope and at the foot you will find the village church with its small folkloric museum. You do not even have to enter the museum in order to admire the playful architecture of the church, the fountain and other paraphernalia.

Megalochori, in the past the capital of the island, is a cute mountain village and is just above Plomari, the ouzo capital of Lesvos. In this charming little city you can visit the distillery and museum of Barbayannis who makes one of the best ouzos of the island and, of course, you have to roam through the picturesque streets with mansions and the remains of old leather, soap and ouzo factories.

There is a third wine road. This one however goes over the sea towards the place with the best wines of the Aegean: the neighbouring island of Limnos. There you will find different wineries producing internationally praised wines as well as slobber wines, as we say in Holland – meaning good and not too expensive wine that you can drink litres of). Most wines are made with the Moschato Alexandrias grapes, but they experiment also with other grapes. Wines from Limnos keep on surprising me. I recently drank a fantastic white, Limnos Premium, which had a fresh sparkling taste. A few wineries also produce a sweet wine and those should be as famous as the Samos wine: they are great. The journey to Limnos cannot be made in one day, but for people who love wine, it is a must to take some days to visit this wine island.

By following these roads you will experience a big part of the island, where most wine is not yet in mass production but is only for local use. Lesvos, a wine island? Yes, indeed it is.

(Thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

The treasures of Megali Limni

2011-05-11T01:41:00.000-07:00

(A volcanic landscape on Lesvos with the village of Agra)

While Western Europe is enjoying one of the hottest springs ever (during Easter lots of heat records were broken); Greece has to make do with a pretty cold and sometimes turbulent end of spring. It is so cold that a fine warm summer seems to be very far away.

In Holland the people will be thinking that the scientists are right in predicting that the world is warming up. However, here in Greece where showers in May still can chase you off the streets and where an ice cold wind that seems to come from the North Pole blows right through your clothes, you will think the opposite.

Scientists cite natural disasters to prove that the world is warming up, but it is the geologists who have proved that in very early times natural disasters were bigger and more disastrous. Digging into the earth, they have found evidence of previous volcanic eruptions and huge tsunamis that flooded the world.

We all know these stories from old writings like the bible and mythology. It was God as well as Zeus who sent floods to the earth to punish the people. In the book Genesis you find the story of Noah who saved himself from the floods by building an ark. There is a Greek myth that tells how Deucalion did the same when Zeus sent floods to the earth. Forewarned by his father Prometheus, Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha built an ark and escaped the water.

You could ask yourself if such a huge flood did really happen. As seashells have been found on top of high mountains — how high could the waves have reached? Thanks to progress in science, more and more proof is offered to suggest that the disasters written about in the bible could have really taken place. Just think about when the Jews fled Egypt and the Red Sea parted, leaving a way to escape. Was this not just the moment before a tsunami came and the sea drew back in order to gather strength and to relaunch its lethal waves later in order to destroy the soldiers chasing the Jews?

Scientists now think that Atlantis existed and was destroyed by a tsunami. Was Atlantis, in fact, the Minoan Empire (27th to 15th century BC) on Crete that — and here the scientist are sure — got destroyed by huge waves following the volcano eruption at Santorini?

Megali Limni (Big Lake) is somewhere near Agiasos and, just like its name suggests, used to be a big water basin that delivered water to Mytilini through the famous aqueducts build by the Romans (parts of which still exist at Moria and Lambou Mili). When in 1823 an uprising against the Turks was put down, the Turkish ruler confiscated the Megali Limni and drained a big part of it to plant wheat and had the inhabitants of Agiasos do forced labour as a punishment. Over a century later, when the Ottomans were thrown off the island, the rest of the lake was drained and it is now still agricultural land, where wheat and fruit trees grow.

Geologists have discovered interesting things in the earth at Megali Limni: the bottom there is easy ‘to read’ and they have seen tracks that go back tens of thousands years (22 to 62 thousands years to be exact). During the investigation of different layers they discovered tephra (fragmented material produced by a volcano eruption) that came from volcanos far away from Lesvos (the Cape Riva on Santorini, the Yali on Nisyros, as well as volcanos on the island of Pantelleria and in the region of Campania in Italy). Imagine what big eruptions those must have been! The disruption caused to flights in Europe last year by the ash clouds from the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull was nothing compared to what happened so many thousand years ago.

And we had the volcano eruptions right here on the island that killed and burned powerful sequoia’s and other trees (and who knows what else), after which heavy rains petrified the trees. But that happened millions of years ago.

The fact is that the earth never has been a save place to live. Ice ages finished tropical woods on Antarctica and after that the earth turned green again. The bottom in Megali Limni shows also that Lesvos was once covered in woods, at other times however there were steppes with barely any vegetation.

Scientists predict that Greece will warm up several degrees and will become more arid, especially in southern parts. Well, here on the island I see nothing warming up. Unless you consider that paddling in the sea wearing your wintercoat in May is a sign that the earth is getting warmer each year. I personally think we are slowly moving to a new Ice Age.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Tulips from the Levant

2011-05-03T03:41:00.000-07:00

(Photo: Tulipa undulatifolia)

Holland is known for its bulbs and especially tulips. Tulips from Amsterdam are world famous, but did you know that the tulip is also the flower of Turkey? Tulips from Istanbul should be as famous as those from Amsterdam.

It is now common knowledge that the famous Dutch bulbs – like the tulips – originated in the region that is now Turkey (see: Tulips from Lesvos). What I did not know is that the Turkish are also very fond of tulips. The name of this special flower originated during the Ottoman Empire and is derived from the Persian word dulband, which means turban. Some say that the tulip is named after the turban because its shape resembles this headgear, others say the flower is named so because for a period the Ottomans loved this flower so much that they decorated their turbans with tulips!

And they were crazy for tulips. Lots of merchants went bankrupt due to the speculations during the tulip mania in Holland (1630 -1637). A few decades later, another tulip mania started in the Ottoman Empire: the Tulip Era (1718 - 1730), which lasted only twelve years, but was important enough to become history.

In this period the Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha decided that business was better than making war. He especially promoted trade relations with western countries. As there was less war related gossip, the elite of Istanbul started being interested in flowers; and because the then ruling Sultan Ahmet III was crazy about tulips, they focussed on tulips. Each spring the Sultan had legendary parties in the gardens of his palace. The guests could not only enjoy the many tulips planted in the garden; the sultan made sure that thousands of tulips were gathered from everywhere in Istanbul. They were placed in coloured bottles and displayed where no tulips normally grew. As the parties were given during the evenings, illumination was supplied by many lamps and candles as well as by tortoises that shuffled about among the flowers with lanterns on their backs.

The newest garden fashions were discussed and there were flower shows, and the person who presented the most beautiful tulip was rewarded with a certificate from the Sultan and a bag of golden coins.

Tulips have remained in Ottoman gardens and since this period their images are everywhere: on embroidery, clothing, in books and in paintings. Even now, the planes of Turkish Airlines have a tulip on their trunk and the municipality of Istanbul annual has three million tulips planted in the city.

Like the famous Dutch Keukenhof, Istanbul also has a famous flower garden: the Emirgan Park on the Bosporus. The park was created in the seventeenth century and is one of the largest in Istanbul. Besides a great collection of special trees and plants, since 2005 it has an annual tulip festival in April where people can enjoy tulips in all sizes and colours.

The Turkish word for tulip is lâle. Lalades comes from this Turkish word and that is what tulips are named on the Greek island of Chios. I am sure that there will be tulips in many gardens on Chios, but this Aegean island just south of Lesvos is famous for its wild tulips. At this time of the year you will find many of them and there are six different species.

Lesvos is not known for its tulips although there are four different species growing on the island. I think they are difficult to find because they look very much the same as the poppy’s that colour the island bright red in the same period. From a distance you can’t tell the difference between a poppy and a tulip so you just have to bump into them by accident or you have to know where to look.

I have never visited Chios when the tulips are flowering, so I do not know if you need a lengthy search there in order to find a field with tulips. Here on the island such a search can last for hours because they prefer to grow on faraway and difficult to reach areas, like on the higher mountain slopes of Lepetymnos and Olympos, as well in the neighbourhood of Klapados. Yesterday I saw wild tulips near Vrisa: they were hidden in a wood on a steep slope, but they were great with fancy undulated leaves and red pointed flower petals:Tulipa undulatifolia. Rumours say that a yellow tulip flowers on the island too. Who knows where?

Today it is the first of May. Here in Greece they celebrate the start of the tourist season, Labour Day and the day of the flowers. Garlands are hung on the doors and lots of Greeks go for a picnic in nature (or they ‘picnic’ in a restaurant). The island now is so gorgeous with all its wild flowers and although I have to admit that a field full of wild tulips is very impressive, I do miss those flowers shops in Amsterdam where they sell lots of different tulips, which you can buy, bring home and put in a vase and for weeks you can enjoy these wonderful flowers. I do understand why there were tulip mania periods. If I had lots of money I would have started one myself.

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

The Throne of Potamon

2011-04-21T03:03:00.000-07:00

(The Throne of Potamon; photo from the internet)

In a few days it will be Easter and this year it will be celebrated on the same day in both Orthodox and Western European countries. In Greece, the summer season starts with Easter. Everywhere people are busy making everything ready for the tourists and on Monday the 11th all the villagers seemed to have fled their homes in order to clean the streets and beaches. Not only in Molyvos, but everywhere on the island, the municipalities have no money for cleaning – so lots of people have volunteered to drag huge garbage bags to to every nook and cranny and to pick up the mess. Schoolchildren were free to participate, so everybody worked together to make the island ready for the season. In this, the crisis has been good for at least something; because the roads and beaches have never looked this clean.

Serious tourism on Lesvos started only in the Seventies. Greece was then still a cheap country to visit and most of the tourists were backpackers and island-hoppers travelling from one island to another. Now this group has moved in the direction of Asia where life still is cheap and most tourists visiting Greece now have pre-booked their hotel and plane before they start travelling.

Centuries ago this was different. Then the word tourist did not exist. You had travellers, of whom small numbers were going around the world. Some of them were writing diaries about their travels and some even published their experiences after they came home safely.

Possibly the very first travel guide was Description of Greece (Ἑλλάδος περιήγησις) written around the second century BC by Pausanias, a native of Lydia. In the 18th century diaries of travellers, like those of Thomas Cook, were very popular and in the 19th century it was the novelists (like Gustave Flaubert, who wrote about about his travels to Egypt and Greece and George Sand who published Un hiver à Mallorca in 1842) who started to travel and publish tales of their adventures,

In earlier times travelling was far more dangerous than nowadays and you had to be a real adventurer to take to the road. When you read the chilling stories of the Englishman William Allen in his travel book The Dead Sea (1855), you would definitely prefer to stay home. It was just here in the Aegean Sea that he was twice attacked by pirates and once was shipwrecked.

The Dutchman Jan Somer, who departed for Spain in 1590, not only visited many countries, but nearly drowned and was captured and enslaved. He had many adventures in Constantinople (now Istanbul). He is one of the few people at that time who wrote a little about the island of Lesvos in his journal Reise naer de Levante.

However, according to Frans R.E. Blom, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam, the very first real Dutch tourist visiting Lesvos and writing about his experiences was the son of a Dutch regent: Gerard Hinlopen from Hoorn. This young man departed in 1670 for a two year journey towards the unknown world and after seeing Spain and Italy boarded a fleet with the destination of Smyrna (now Izmir) in the Ottoman Empire. In Smyrna, having had enough of his travel companions, he disguised himself as a Turk and set off with a Turkish shipper along the coasts en route to Constantinople.

This is how Gerard Hinlopen came upon the island of Lesvos and he wrote down entertaining descriptions amongst others about the castle of Mytilini, the hot baths, the aqueduct of Moria and, as he was a bachelor, he praised the Lesviot women. Then he made a great discovery. Monks showed him a stone chair that they had dug out of the earth. It was beautifully carved out of a single piece of marble. Its inscription was carefully noted down by Hinlopen. On his return home he had the inscription translated and after some archaeologists discussed the matter they agreed that this was the Throne of Potamon. Potamon was the son of Lesbonax, a famous orator who was also known for his advocacy of Lesvos during his long stay in Rome at the court of Cesar Augustus, where he tried to winkle out some favours for his island.

When the rumours hit the grapevine about this archaeological find, more and more visitors came to Lesvos in order to see this marble throne: it became the first attraction of Lesvos, described by more than one traveller (Old Tracks and new landmarks by Mary Adeleid Walker [1897] and Travels & Discoveries in the Levant by Charles Thomas Newman [1865]).

If we believe the travellers of many centuries ago Lesvos was famous for its antiquities. After the occupation of the Ottomans however not much was left. Greek cultural landmarks were destroyed or used to make new buildings. Today, Lesvos’ biggest attraction is thousands years older than all those cultural antiquities - but it is a geographical treasure: the Petrified Forest that opened to the public in 1994. Reading the old travel diaries we get a glimpse of how Lesvos used to be (for instance Mary Adeleid Walker’s description of her difficult travel from Mytilini to Molyvos and Petra). Thanks to these reports we also know that Lesvos used to be famous for something quite different than the Petrified Forest: the Throne of Potamon.

When more and more travellers came to have a look at the throne, the marble block was placed in the house of the archbishop. Even then people were trying to lay hands on it, like the French ambassador to Constantinople, Marie-Gabriel Choiseul-Gouffier. The famous Lord Elgin, although he did manage to get part of the Parthenon front, did not succeed with the Throne of Potamon. The throne still sits on the island.

During Easter the archbishop would sit on the Throne of Potamon to distribute Easter eggs to the people and to drink to their health. The throne has now been placed in the Archaeological Museum in Mytilini and will remain empty during Easter - no leader nor tourist will remember the Throne of Potamon.

Happy Easter!

(with thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

Donkey Milk Cheese

2011-04-12T01:49:00.000-07:00

(Photo from internet)

Why do we drink milk from the cow? If we are to believe scientists –other milk – like that of a goat – is far more healthy. It is obvious that the choice depends on making money: a cow produces far more milk than a goat and so the consumer will drink milk from the cow.

All over the world however goat milk is drunk sparingly and also used for the production of tasty cheeses. Is there any other milk besides that of a goat or a cow? Yes, indeed there is. All female mammals give milk when they have younglings. For instance, donkey milk, which is only known to most people as the cosmetic used by Cleopatra to bath in.

Some spouses of Roman emperors, like Poppaea Sabina, the second wife of Emperor Nero, tried to be as beautiful as Cleopatra and washed themselves with asses milk. They didn’t worry that donkeys did not give as much milk as a cow, they had plenty of money to keep hundreds of donkeys just for their beauty.

What they probably did not know in that time was that of all the different animal milks - donkey milk is the closest to mother’s milk and also far more healthy than cow milk. Asses milk contains less fat, more proteins and some 60 % more vitamin C. Donkey milk also has no harmful bacteria so you do not have to pasteurize it. So why do we not drink donkey milk?

The oldest woman in the world lived in Ecuador. She died at the age of 116! After her death her children told the press that the secret of their mother’s great age might have been regular drinking of donkey milk.

Here in Greece they do not drink donkey milk. The big number of donkeys that Greece used to have were used for transport or to mill grain or olives. For example a donkey could walk forever in circles to get the olive oil out of the olives. Now that machinery and cars have put the donkeys out of work, the number of donkeys in Greece have decreased so much that they could almost be added to the list of endangered animals.

Of the Greek donkeys that are now still around, most have a lazy life, except for some like those on Santorini, where donkeys are exploited to carry tourists up and down the volcano. The not working class of donkeys roam through the landscape and along the streets, enjoying bright green grasses (off course they prefer to eat everything you planted in your garden) and some times they take a little safari with tourists on their backs.

Lots of donkeys here on Lesvos in the winter are free – except for those who work a bit in the olive harvest – and roam through the mountains where they find plenty of young green plants. Last week the donkeys of Michalis and Costas, our local donkey farmers, got even more lucky: they went for a holiday! Well, it was a working holiday because they had to participate in a donkeycross.

Can you imagine: around a hundred donkeys boarding the ferry in Mytilini? I do not know if they were sea sick, but I just saw them now here in Eftalou making their first safari of the season and they looked pretty happy to me.

Their journey was to Makrinitsa, a traditional village in Pelia, close to Volos, where the booze company Red Bull organized the ‘donkeycross’. I have never heard about a sport called this: obviously it is a combination of motocross and donkey riding. Thirty illustrious motocross drivers were invited to make the streets of Makrinitsa dangerous by riding both their iron bikes and donkeys. No easy job driving a motorcycle along the old village steps, a water basin and steep donkey trails. Riding a donkey looks more easy, except that donkeys do not like to be ordered around, especially when you try to get them in gear to reach the finish line. The effect was hilarious. And now I understand why the youngsters of Molyvos run their motorbikes through the small cobbled streets and steps: they are practising for a ‘donkeycross’ because, believe me, Molyvos is more than suitable for such an event.

Until now only the donkeys of Molyvos had a taste of this joyful event: they toted those sturdy motor devils with their helmets and leathers through Makrinitsa, although it seemed to me that more than one participant had to drag his donkey to the finish line. So when you ride a donkey here this summer imagine that the saddle you are sitting in might have been used by one of those famous motor riders.

Besides riding these four legged animals there is another use for a donkey. That is why I give my golden advice to Michalis and Costas: open a donkey dairy. Last February in London the launch of selling mother’s milk ice cream was covered worldwide by the press. An asses milk ice cream, after a tiring donkey safari, might be the right refreshment. And when you can make cheese out of mother’s milk – like the Dutch artist Ine Poppe did in 1984 and as was done last year by the restaurant Klee Brasserie in New York, that also added ‘Mommy’s milk cheese’ to it’s menu - I am sure you can make donkey milk cheese. Plenty of donkeys here, aren’t there?

(With thanks to Mary Staples)

@ Smitaki 2011

A farewell to Tony

2011-04-01T03:46:00.000-07:00

Now that I finally changed as well in also
Now that you teached me fishes are fish
And after so many other English corrections
You left us.

After you did this huge job
In correcting and commenting on my columns
And finally the book
You left us

Without me having a chance to pay you back
In dinners and fish
Without me reading
The Final Review

Reading about you
You were more than great in Australia
Writing about so many topics
And finally again about Japan

Here on the other end of the world
Where the news of a shark kept papers alive
You left your traces in friendships
And dinners and party’s

I have been lucky
That one day you and Jane walked into my house
And so we met
And so we worked

Here in the country
Where old history
Of brave wars and great philosophers
Seem to live so close with modern live

You found an island of peace
Sunken into the blue Mediterranean
Where Greeks and foreigners
Mingled into a life of happiness

Here in the little town of Molyvos
For decennia you came back again and again
And now Molyvos lost another
Of its big writers.

Tony, thank you for everything!

Julie

Tony Barrell (7 mei 1940 – 31 maart 2011)

Oh oh, a shark!

2011-03-31T03:05:00.000-07:00

(The shark of Petra; Photo: Eleonora Pouwels)

DID YOU SEE THE BOOK SCATTERLIGHT DONKEYS & FOXBALLS ICE CREAM? LOOK FOR MORE INFORMATION HERE!

You can feel totally happy standing knee deep in spring flowers and looking out at a calm blue sea. In trees and bushes birds are singing their spring songs but on such days there’s another sound that makes me very happy: the simmering of the motor of a small fishing boat gliding over the water.

I have never gone fishing in my life, not many women do, and especially here on a Greek island it’s men’s business. Even in winter, if the weather is good, men who have a little boat will go out for whole days on end looking for a catch. Because their husbands spend so much time at sea, lots of women probably curse the fish. Those men without a boat might go to a stretch of coast where they can throw out a line from a rod.

Even though Molyvos has over the years changed into an attractive tourist village, fish soup is still available but the fishing itself has changed too. You can see how from Psarades ke Psaremata, a short black and white film made here in 1960 by the marine biologist Kostas Ananiadis.

I had no idea there were so many ways to catch fish or that sometimes half of the village would take part in communal fishing trips. Like for example during a so called Tsetes lots of boats would go out together, throw the nets, make a line and to chase the fish in they would throw stones in the water, bat it with sticks and stamp their feet on the boats’ wooden floors in what looks like an elegant dance.

For the so called GriGri the boats would leave the harbour for the night, some with powerful lamps in their bows, which the film’s commentary says had the power of 2000 candle watts. The boats with lights would attract the fish, and the others would then quietly steal up and quickly drop a large net over the shoal.

While half of the village was out there for the Grigri, children roamed over the rocks and shallow waters with torches to attract and spear more fish.

In those years fishermen even used dynamite. They would throw bait into the water and when the fish came for it out went the dynamite sticks and then they just had to pick up their haul. The commentator in Psarades ke Psaremata remarks that there was a risk to this kind of practice, as is clear where the man throwing the sticks of dynamite has only one arm.

There were also days when nobody could go out to the sea because of strong northerly winds. Then a large group of fishermen might look for sheltered beaches where they could throw a drag-net into the sea, pull it across the sea bottom and haul it on to the beach. After hours of this kind of hard work the catch might be a mere half basket of fish. In the movie they say: the plate of the fisherman is nine times empty, the tenth time it is filled with plenty of fish.

Even in those times there were already trawlers dragging their vast nets along the sea bottom. Nowadays Greek trawlers are even bigger with crews from Egypt spending days at sea.

Nobody here, except tourists, gets very excited these days when the fishing boats come back into harbour. Except last week, half the village went down to Petra harbour when a boat came with a three-and-a-half metre shark alongside. Small sharks in the nets are quite common around Lesvos, but one of this size is a rare sight. It needed a crane to get it out of the water. According to eyewitness Jan Hoekstra, a Dutch tourist: ‘The animal was filleted on the quay and a refrigerated truck was brought to take it away. Those cutting up the fish found it was pregnant with fifty-six little baby sharks. Someone remarked “Good job they caught her, otherwise it would have been very dangerous for snorkellers and tourists!”. Which suggests to me that some Greeks do not know much about wild animals, because this fish Cetorhinus maximus is on the red list of threatened sea beasts, normally swims only in deep waters and eats small fish and plankton.’

I am no hero regarding sharks and I dare not even look at the Jaws movies, because for sure I won’t dare to go for a swim for several days after. When there is such a catch I immediately wonder where was it made. So with shaking hands I opened my internet search engine and typed in ‘sharks in Greece’ fearing that although I know better, I was going to find they are all over Greece.

Well, in the Mediterranean there are forty-six species of sharks of which sixteen can grow to more than three metres and fifteen of which are said to be dangerous. But do not panic: most sharks in Greece are only seen when they are scooped up by fishermen or end up on the plates of those restaurants that serve a small species called Galeos. In all the Mediterranean, encounters between swimmers and sharks are so rare you would think there were no sharks living there at all. The ones that do are not interested in people and – as Jan Hoekstra mentioned above - only want fish or plankton. You have a bigger chance of being stung by a jellyfish than experiencing a bloody attack by a shark.

The movie Psarades ke Psaremata only shows hauls of small fish. Last year Leon Loïsios finished another documentary (for Greek television channel ERT) to update the original 1960 film as a homage to the old fishermen of Molyvos and their ways of fishing, and to show how the majority of fish is now caught by big trawlers. In the new film you can also see Adonis, the cat & dog man of Eftalou who died last year. He is seen cooking food for his brood of animals and going out in his little boat with a bottomless bucket to spot the fish.

Sadly the sight of Adonis fishing has vanished, but there are still plenty of fishing boats moving up and down the coast. The small one-man boats go out for fish to feed the family so I think that the Grigri and Tsetes ‘dances’ belong only to the past. Most old fishermen don’t tell tales of shark catching, so I bet there were very few.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2011

The Radiating Island

2011-03-22T04:29:00.000-07:00

(Hot springs of Lisvori)

DID YOU SEE THE BOOK SCATTERLIGHT DONKEYS & FOXBALLS ICE CREAM? LOOK FOR MORE INFORMATION HERE!

As far as we know Marie Curie (1867–1934) was probably the first person to die from radioactivity poisoning. The Polish-French physicist and chemist is regarded as one of the discoverers of radioactivity, a natural phenomenon by which material emits ionizing particles. In her time it was not thought radiation was dangerous which may be the reason she died (of anaemia) at the age of 66.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the world fell in love with the discovery. Not only was X-radiation a big step forward in medical science, the radioactive element radium was for a short time popular in the home pharmacy. In the Twenties and Thirties you could buy beauty creams, toothpaste, salves, soaps and even chocolates all containing a little bit of radium; products that were thought to be good for your health. Pads that had to be held to the nose or mouth (or elsewhere) were manufactured to cure almost any ailment.

Since the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 it also became known that many hot springs contained radium and so they too were thought to be very healthy. There was a run on the spas, but only for rich people who could afford to travel. They bathed in it, they sniffed its air and drank plenty of this radioactive water. The question was: how to bring it to the masses?

Adding radium to water and bottling it was no good because its radioactive properties soon decayed. The solution they found was a radioactive crock, or jar, in which you could make radioactive water at home. You put the jar in water overnight and then you could drink as much irradiated ‘healing’ water as you liked. The best known jar in those early days was made in San Francisco - the Revigator. Hundred of thousands of them were sold. In 1929 a Revigator cost $29.90 which was quite a sum, so it was a goldmine of a business.

In the Thirties they realized that radioactive products may not be so healthy. As they contained more and more radium in their miracle healers some people took overdoses. Even though radioactive products were banned you could still find some (illegal of course) products for sale as late as the 1980s.

What many people probably don’t know is that every day we are subjected to some kind of radiation from both the atmosphere and the earth. Even people radiate, so when you sleep with somebody, you get it from your bedfellow! Natural radiation varies from place to place. It’s higher in Norway than Germany and at some places on the earth like India, China and Brazil it can be even higher.

Very high natural radiation has been measured in Ramsar, in the north of Iran. The effect it has on people who live there has been the subject of a scientific study.

As we do in Lesvos, the region of Ramsar has plenty of hot springs, all with a varying amount of radium. Both tourists and locals use these springs and nobody seems to care about radiation, they only become healthier.

I sometimes say (as a joke) that the small amounts of (unharmful) radioactivity here in the hot springs of Lesvos make you resistant to radioactivity, just as insects become resistant to some pesticides. Anyway, the research seems to confirm that. The inhabitants of Ramsar have built up a resistance to radioactivity!

I have no idea how much radiation comes from the hot springs of Lesvos. People have been living here with these magic springs for so long I’m not worried that there’s a little bit more radiation here than is measured back in Holland.

Scientists agree that a small amount of natural radiation does not harm anyone. Radiation from a nuclear plant is something different. Sir James Chadwick, an English physicist, identified the neutron in 1934, a discovery that led the way to nuclear energy. A year later he received the Nobel price for his work. The results of his research are not so noble: they changed the world.

Greece has no nuclear plants, nor has neighbouring country Turkey but one is planned for Akkuyu, on the Mediterranean coast in the southern province of Mersin, and there are plans for another one at Sinop on the Black Sea. They may not have not learned anything from the recent events in Japan, because it was recently announced that construction of the first power plant (to be built by the Russians) will go ahead and should be working in a few years. Both the Turkish premier Tayyip Erdogan and his energy minister Hilmi Guler have told the world that their nuclear plant will be able to resist any natural disaster. Nevertheless, protests are flaring up, because the site is next to a fault line in an active earthquake region.

Here on our healthy radium-active island nature is moving into its best season: spring. And who knows, if those researchers at Ramsar are right I am building up a resistance to radioactivity. So curing yourself in the hot springs acquires another meaning: preparing yourself against nuclear disasters!

Resistant or not, I am definitely against nuclear power plants, especially when they are built in a part of the world with a very high risk of earthquakes.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2011

Help, they are eating the island away!

2011-03-17T01:02:00.000-07:00

(A nest of Processionaries)

DID YOU SEE MY BOOK YET? LOOK FOR MORE INFORMATION HERE!

Greece is not really a country you enter fearing you might be stepping into a jungle full of creepy animals. You can find scorpions hidden under a stone, in spring you can meet with snakes but most of them are not poisonous. There are some spiders which like to bite but encountering them is actually an opportunity to see a very special animal because they are so rare. In the sea you might bump into a jellyfish, or out for a walk you might get stung by a wasp or a bee but generally it will mean you suffer just a few moments of pain.

There is however a small and innocent looking animal that kills and destroys, not people, but animals and small trees: the Pine Processionary (Thaumetopoea pityocampa). Maybe you have never come across a procession of caterpillars — thousands of them shuffling head to toe through the landscape, but may have seen their nests: they look like fat, white woollen candy at the end of a branch. In Holland it is mostly the Oak Processionary caterpillar which destroys the landscape. In Mediterranean countries such as Spain, France and Greece the Pine Processionary can eat whole forests away.

Their names tell you where they make their nests — either in oaks or pines (as in Lesvos). They gather at the end of a branch and spin a woolly ball. In daytime you do not see them because it is at night that they are active and go out to gnaw away at the foliage. You might notice that the branch which bears a nest will be totally bare of leaves and if it’s a young tree all its leaves or needles will be eaten. And since the leaves (or needles) function as the lungs of a tree, without them it will die.

As long as they stay in their nest the Processionaries won’t do any harm to people or animals (as long as you aren’t one for walking in the woods at night). But in spring – March and April – they leave their nests in huge processions to look for a place where they can go to ground and pupate until summer when they turn into moths. So you better not meet with them during their migration, because when they sense danger they shoot out bristles (one caterpillar can have as many as 63.000) which contain a toxin which can settle anywhere (trees, clothing, whatever) and cause allergic reactions. Dogs or cats who get it on their tongues can even die.

However the Pine Processionary are most lethal to trees. At the end of the summer the moth lay their eggs. The caterpillars hatch and wander around on their own until they gather together to build nests for winter. You can probably imagine the effect a hungry nest has on a tree especially if there are more than one.

When you travel across the heart of the island, which is covered in pine trees, you can’t avoid seeing hundreds, even thousands of nests. On the road from Kalloni to Vatera many small trees have already succumbed. And more than one big tree really looks seriously distressed. I noticed around Vatera olive and palm trees also looking miserable, but, the pines are the ones that bear the brunt of their attention. I bet when they have eaten all the pines, they’ll retrain themselves to eat the olive leaves and then you can really say goodbye to the beauty of this island.

So what can be done? In earlier times they would have sprayed them by air with chemical pesticides, but it was realised that this did killed lots more besides the caterpillars. So it’s better to use a biological spray — but that costs lots of money. I don’t think an island that doesn’t have enough money to repair its roads will be interested in buying fancy biological pesticides. Another way is to burn the nests, which is a very dangerous job because of those toxic hairs, and there are scientists who think this is not drastic enough. However, I think it might be a fine job for the army, as long as they don’t burn down the whole island.

Now the winter cold has gone from the air and temperatures are soaring upwards again lots of trees are already besieged and look very unhappy. It seems the winter just past was not quite cold enough to kill off the caterpillars (they can survive down to —16°C) and so in pretty big numbers they are eating the island away.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2011

Kite flying and grilled shellfish

2011-03-09T09:46:00.000-08:00

(Photo from the internet)

(Read a review about my book Scatterlight Donkeys & Foxballs Ice Cream in Greek and English)

When I was young I used to go kite flying with my brother and friends in the sand dunes of Holland. It was a lot of fun, but we also got a lot of scratches from to the prickly bushes in which the kites used to land. I do remember that we had some with white planes and red rotating wings, but the other kinds of kite I don’t remember.

When you look for kites on the internet you will find lots of sellers. But to find a simple one in a shop is a different matter. The kite world used to be all about single-line kites, as they are called now, but now you can buy kites in all sizes and sorts, because catching the wind for flying or surfing is booming and even the simple single-line kite world has developed: just have a look at the prices they charge — up to several hundred euros.

I believe as kids we probably weren’t much good at kite flying, either that or the kites were sub-standard. All I remember is the huge amount of time we spent painfully searching for ones that went off course and crashed in inaccessible places.

Most websites say kite flying came from China. The story goes that because it was always being blown off by the wind a farmer once tied his hat on with a length of string. Then there was the general who used one to measure the distance of a road into a city he wished to conquer. There are plenty of other stories about the military using kites in warfare: one army refused to continue fighting because the soldiers saw a shooting star that was thought to be a bad omen. The general sent up a kite with a fireball attached, the soldiers thought this it was a comet (a good omen) and resumed fighting.

One website says that kite flying came from countries around the Pacific ocean where people flew them with nets and bait attached to their tails to catch fish, which seems to me a rather complicated but spectacular way of fishing.

Most websites say that at the end of the thirteenth century Marco Polo brought kites to Europe. However they already existed in Greece, as is proved by an image on a vase from the fourth century BC, on which you can see a young girl with a kite. I haven’t found any mythological stories about Greek gods flying kites, although there is the tale of Icarus, who would not listen to his father’s warning and flew too close to the sun on a pair of wings made with wax. They melted so he crashed to the earth.

Even now we can fly around the world in metal machines single-line kite flying is still pretty popular. In many places there are kite festivals where ever more and bigger kites are flown. In many countries kite flying on special days is a tradition, like today in Greece where it is Clean Monday (Kathara Deftera) the last day of the carnival before the beginning of Lent.

Yesterday the children of Molyvos got together to fly kites — well mostly it was their fathers — and even though it rained in the morning and the sky was grey, the little festival was a success because a good wind took the kites way up into the clouds. Today it was more difficult because the wind grew too strong, in fact it brought a storm and freezing temperatures. Not that it stopped people from holding their carnival in the schoolyard. Even though there was no money to fund a big parade there was plenty of fun with singing, dancing, food and a bit to drink.

When the carnival event was over it was time for a proper feast and even though the economic crisis is ongoing the restaurants had plenty of custom. On Clean Monday no meat or fish is eaten, only molluscs and shellfish, of which there was plenty. The day before yesterday a friend gave me a bag of clams and I found some other shellfish. I knew the shells as a kind of ark clams or long clam, but I had never eaten them. So I telephoned the friend who suggested I put them on the grill. Grilled shellfish? Well, in a way I was pleased because often the shellfish you get straight from the fishermen are so covered in algae and mud it is messy and hard work cleaning them for cooking. Now I only had to put them on the grill over our open fire and they opened up just like blue mussels and they had a wonderful smoky taste.

The Greeks eat shellfish raw. My stomach does not agree with that. Today I was with friends who lit the barbeque to grill some rather unorthodox meat and there was also brought a bag of shellfish: oysters, clams and small scallops all of which we grilled. They were superb. After dinner we probably bulged a little and could have done with some kite flying exercise but the roaring wind and the cold where too extreme so the kites were returned to their cupboards until next year. It’s a pity it’s only an annual tradition.

(With thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2011

Between hope and Hades

2011-03-04T08:42:00.001-08:00

(Almond blossom and an asphodel)

The almond tree is the first to blossom, often as early as January. But while the anemones started blooming last November the almonds kept us waiting. They only now starting their metamorphosis into wonderful pink-white clouds. Vincent Van Gogh used to love almond blossoms and one of his well known paintings was done to celebrate the birth of his brother’s wife’s new baby. His almond branches are set against a stark blue sky and the flowers seem to be floating through heaven.

Here in the north of the island, after months of sunshine and warm temperatures, the weather has become more wintry: grey skies and a freezing north wind. As we walk under the almond trees we may miss Van Gogh’s bright blue sky against his delicate pink-white blossoms, but a grey sky can’t spoil the lightness you feel as you take in their fragrant sweet scent. It tells you spring will come soon. The almond tree stands for hope and it is an inspiration for nice stories.

One of the sons of Theseus was Demophon who fought together with all the other heroes and demi-gods at Troy. After the fighting on his way home he met a Thracian princess Phyllis. They fell in love but before they could marry Demophone had to go home and settle his affairs. And so Phyllis waited for his return. And she waited and waited. Some stories say that each day she went to the shore to look out for her lover, others say she waited before the family altar for him. She became more and more despairing and finally took her own life. The goddess Athena had mercy on her and transformed her into an almond tree. When Demophon finally returned to Thrace he found the almond tree. The story goes that the tree was barren of blossom but when Demophon embraced it, suddenly thousands of blossoms sprouted out of the branches.

In Portugal they also have a nice story about the almond tree: once upon a time a Moorish king married a Norwegian princess and they lived in the Algarve. However, the princess did not like the beautiful landscape with its singing birds and colourful flowers and was homesick for the cold and the snow of her own country. She became more and more depressed, would not leave the palace and even had all windows shut because she did not want to face the landscape any more.
However, early in March the king ordered that all windows had to be opened and he made the princess look out. There she saw that everything had turned white - the entire landscape was covered by a layer of almond blossom. Her homesickness disappeared and from then on she and the king lived a long and happy life.

Walking through the ‘snowy’ landscape I have noticed that the almond blossom is not the only flower giving the landscape its spring-like look. The asphodels (Asphodelus aestivus) have also started to flower and from a distance the two look alike. However, there are many differences between them. The sea of almond blossoms seem to descend from the sky while the asphodels send their flowers from deep in the earth. While sweet scenting almond blossoms are like a gift from heaven asphodels are said to come from in the underworld of Hades. I once picked a bunch of these beautiful flowers, but never again - they do not smell nice!

Asphodels used to be planted around graves, as a reminder of the underworld, but I see them as harbingers of spring. They used to be a favourite flower of Persephone, daughter of Demeter, who was abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld. Many images of Persephone depict her with a garland of them around her head. Maybe the odour in the underworld is already so bad that you would not notice the asphodels. It’s a pity they have this sharp and bitter smell (which you have to be quite near to notice) because their white-rose flowers are as plentiful in the countryside as the almonds. The yellow species (Asphodeline lutea) is a popular flower in the gardens of western Europe, but here it’s the wild white variety which fills the fields here, giving us a view every bit as beautiful as the almond blossoms. It is a pity that they are so little appreciated.

The plant belongs to the lily family and grows from a bulb. You can’t miss them as they often reach as high as a metre. Homer wrote of them as the flowers from the Underworld and Pliny advised they be planted in front of a country house to keep witches away. Theophrastus said the bulbs are good to eat - served together with figs. They were cooked in warm ashes, sprinkled with a little salt and oil and it is said that they were also a favourite of Pythagoras. The pulp of the cooked bulbs was used to treat diseases of the joints and nerves, while fresh pulp was good to remove freckles and asphodel seeds marinated in wine were believed to be a remedy for snake and scorpion bites. So you could say it is a plant with many uses. Now they are in shadow of the almond blossoms, so typical of the early spring landscape, but alas almost forgotten.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2011

UFOs have landed!

2011-02-23T02:21:00.000-08:00

(A platform with solar panels close to Skalochori)

While the old Greece still wrestles with its great crisis, investors are busy making the country ready for the future. Slim windmills are invading the landscape as more and more licenses are given for big green energy projects.

For example, one group wants to build the biggest solar park in the Balkans, just outside of the city of Kozani, in northern Greece. It will cost hundreds of millions of euro but will create lots of green energy and jobs.

However, I am glad they did not choose Lesvos for it because that many solar panels would definitively mark our landscape. However, Lesvos too is building its future. I had not been to the west of the island for months, but a few days ago I got a big surprise when it seemed I had arrived in the middle of a UFO-park. On both sides of the road from Skoutaros to Skalochori huge solar platforms which look as if they are based on the design for a UFO have been installed. Take a look at the one filmed near Eresos (on YouTube). Does it not look like flying sun panels?

Lesviots are not completely unfamiliar with UFOs. Last summer I spoke to a couple of Greeks who told me that their son was sure he was followed by one on his way to Eresos. But the really big UFO-year here was 1954, when in autumn hundreds of people saw them. The sightings were reported in newspaper stories at the time:

October 6. A telegram from a local police station on Lesvos island (Aegean sea), reports that at 3:15 pm, the mayor and residents of Vryssos community, saw a small star-like object which manoeuvered over the village for a quarter of an hour. Eventually, at 3:30 pm, it moved to the NW, then North and finally disappeared westwards. (Acropolis, October 7.)

October 8. Another telegram from the same source reports that at 6:00 pm a luminous object with a ‘tail’ was seen hovering over Anemotia village. The UFO was as big as the full moon and emitted beams of gold-white light. After three minutes it moved NE and disappeared. (Macedonia, October 9.)

October 9. Again at Lesvos island, Mr S. Horiatellis and his 12 year-old son were hunting near the village of Stymmi, when they witnessed a luminous cigar-shaped body, moving horizontally. The object then moved vertically and simultaneously parted in two. Both parts were also cigar-shaped and continued to moving with a constant distance between them. The newspaper reports that these two UFOs were also sighted by scientists in nearby Turkey. (Hellenicos Vorras - Hellenic North - October 10.)

October 15. Another telegram from the local police station of Ayassos, Lesvos, reports a ‘luminous phenomenon’, witnessed by hundreds of people. The UFO was round and hovered at 2-3,000 m (6-9,000 ft) for about half and hour. It disappeared, then reappear after ten minutes, divided into two separate objects that departed and vanished, moving into two different directions. (Acropolis, October 16, Macedonia, October 19.)

At that same time strange flying objects were seen in other parts of Greece, also in France and in South America. Nowadays you might still sometimes see unidentified objects in the sky, but most people no longer believe they are ‘UFOs’. So when traveling through the west part of Lesbvos, and you suddenly think you arrived at an UFO-airport, don’t panic. What you see there is the landscape of the future, needed for green energy. Maybe the whole of West Lesvos is going to be conquered by these UFO-looking solar panels and Don Quixote-style windmills: a modern energy park that will be a great contrast to the national park with its forest of ancient petrified trees.

With this much green energy you might think that the electric car will be introduced pretty soon. But for that to happen lots of our moonlike roads full of pot-holes and craters will have to be remade - especially at Eftalou and Petra - where, as long as the economic crisis lasts, they will no doubt remain a fairground attraction for car drivers!

(With thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2011

Island of Dracula!

2011-02-16T00:06:00.000-08:00

(Photo from the internet)

Imagine that you find on old grave and you open it to do some research and you discover a skeleton that has been hammered into its coffin with huge spikes! Not so long ago this happened to the American archaeologist Hector Williams of the University of British Columbia, who has been investigating relics around Mytilini. He found the grave in a nineteenth century Turkish cemetery near the city’s northern harbour.

It seems likely that people had buried a man who they feared might rise from the dead: one spike was hammered through his throat, another through his pelvis and a third through his ankle. And to be sure heavy stones were placed on the coffin lid.

The find blew a gust of excitement through the scientific world, made all the more mysterious with the discovery of another grave close to a little Taxiarchis church just above Mytilini. Here the same enormous spikes were found lying beside the skeleton. The find suggested that people thought they were burying a vampire and it inspired the film director Julian Thomas to make a television documentary (for the History Channel) about it. He called it Vampire Island. The poor spike-victim was called ‘Vlad’, after the Walachian ruler Vlad Tepes (1431-1476), aka Vlad Dracula or count Dracula.

It was the Irish writer Bram Stoker who made vampires popular (and feared) in Western Europe with his book Dracula (1897), a fantasy about the blood guzzling count Dracula from Transylvania. Stories about vampires however are much older and every culture has mythical beings who rise from the dead to drink the blood of the living. In Greek culture they are the vrikolakes.

Belief in vampires is mainly caused by fear that the dead will come back from their graves to take revenge. There are enough creepy (and hilarious) movies which have scenes in which the dead suddenly stir from their coffins.

The TV documentary tried to explain this fear of the living dead by, for example, the chemical reactions that continue in a body after death - cause nails and hair keep growing for a while, gasses make the belly swell up and rigor mortis can cause limbs to make small movements.

In ancient times people who were different were often treated as outcasts. If they were physically or mentally ill people were afraid they could change into a vampire after death - especially people suffering from tuberculosis (who give up blood when they are very ill).
But what of our Vlad? Scientist researching his skeleton think he was a strong and healthy man, so he was probably an outcast for another reason.

Here in Greece people get buried a day after they die. They then stay in the ground for two years. Traditionally, the family would look after them for this time in the afterlife by bringing food, drink and some conversation. Nowadays the custom of leaving food and drinks at the grave has faded but as long as they are in their graves the dead can still expect plenty of company. At the end of the two years the remains are dug up by which time it is to be hoped all bones will have turned white. If they are not clean or they are black it means the person must have been a sinner and the family should be ashamed. The remains of such people have to be reburied and if after a second exhumation the bones are still not white, it means maybe the deceased was not even human and, who knows, might have even been a vampire.

However, science has proved that the colour of bones depends on the kind of soil they were buried in and anyway they can be washed white by a priest with wine and vinegar (which is another way of dealing with vampires). This way the family doesn’t have to be ashamed of the dead person’s reputation.

The English Archaeologist Charles Thomas Newton wrote a book about his time here on Lesvos, where he was vice consul in Mytilini from 1852 to 1855 - Travels and Discoveries in the Levant (1865). In it he said that in the sea near the coast of the capital there was a small island where anyone suspected of being a vampire was buried. Since people believed that vampires could not survive in salt water, if they did come back to life they could not escape from the island.

According to archaeologist Hector Williams, Newton was referring to an islet just across from Pamfila. Williams did not yet get the chance to dig around there, but from a plane he thought saw the remains of old buildings and he is sure that it was a place unique on earth - vampire island!

Just across from Crete is the island Spinalonga. For some years it has been a popular tourist destination but until the 1950s when a cure was found it was a leper colony. At that time not many people dared visit Spinalonga but these days lots of visitors fearlessly roam the island.

Hector Williams thinks Lesvos has a vampire cemetery just offshore. I hope he soon will dig up its graves to prove his theory. Who knows what atrocities the graves will reveal? It will give the myth of Dracula a Greek twist and could be a stimulus to tourism on Lesvos.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2011

Scatterlight Donkeys & Foxballs Ice Cream

2011-02-09T02:40:00.000-08:00

Eight years ago, when I sent first reports back to family and friends about life here on the Greek island of Lesvos, I never thought they would end up in a weekly column, let alone a book. But now it is there: this week the book will be ready.

In my years here I have learned a lot - about the food, the celebrations, the people and daily life, the rhythm of the seasons (especially summer and winter) and history. The most wondrous part of life here is Nature which keeps surprising me with what she brings, not only the oceans of plants but its marvellous vistas. Take a walk on any evening along the seashore towards the setting sun and the colours of the sea will never bore you. On windless days along the gulf of Kalloni the views are always breathtaking. A dramatic moon coming up, snow on Mt Lepetymnos or just the sun scattering her light across the olive trees, and I never stop saying: wow, so beautiful.

Of course I discovered there were negatives: a bad bureaucratic system, people pushing in shopping queues, careless drivers, the throw-away garbage culture and cruelty to animals. Greece is not the Netherlands, but I didn’t come here to try to teach Greeks how to behave. All I could do was try and live a good life myself and not get too upset. In the years I’ve been here I have seen a lot of changes. These days more people fight for a better life for animals and for a cleaner environment; they are more likely to share the road with other users; pushing and shoving is decidedly old fashioned and where once piles of waste grew abundantly in the landscape, there are now far fewer illegal dumps to be seen. I even hear that the Molyvos town garbage dump is going to be closed down and replaced by a central waste plant on the island. However I will believe that when I see it.

This year car owners are happier because there is a new ministry of transport (KTEO here) inspection point. It used to take a whole day to get your car checked, and the staff were pretty rude, but now there’s a brand new building where you can watch the process from behind a big glass screen while pretty young girls make sure you car is ready in ten to twenty minutes.

Today I read on the local website MyMolyvos.com that I now live in ‘Natura Area’ No. GR4110012, called Northern’ Lesvos, which includes Mt Lepetymnos, Petra, Molyvos, Stipsi, Ypsolometopo and Mandamados, a region which is a protection zone for plants and animals (especially birds). Natura 2000 is a network of protected areas across the European Union.

So there are some new things going on the island where not much seems to happen - but even though we do more and more catching up with modern times. The traffic on the main road from Kalloni to Mytilini gets more and dense, the lesser roads remain as quiet as ever. In some of the villages far away from the tourist itinerary time seems to have stopped altogether. Although you might suddenly see a huge new building (mostly for storing animal feed), more mighty windmills or a freshly bituminized stretch of road.

But don’t be put off: Lesvos is still the enchanting island that people knew many years ago and I hope I have done it justice in my columns. And for those who don’t know Lesvos, please take a look at the book and see for yourself how much variety there is here from the petrified trees, the curling monopatia (ancient foot paths), quiet beaches, sleepy villages, charming cozy towns that have few tourists and the capital of Mytilini itself where there is still much to discover.

Scatterlight Donkeys & Foxballs Ice Cream will be published Wednesday February 9 so you have time to get a copy before Valentines Day. The saint’s connection with Lesvos, is one of the stories in the book. So make somebody happy with not only my writing but the beautiful photographs of Jan van Lent and the sensational graphic design by Jeroen Koster: a special book for a special person!

title: Scatterlight Donkeys & Foxballs Ice Cream
orginal Dutch title: Strooilichtezels & Vossenballenijs
editor: Smitaki (Julie Smit)
distribution: Boom distributiecentrum

publication date: c February 11 2011
dimensions: 260 by 210 mm
binding: hardback
pp: 288
photos: 320
columns: 123
ISBN (Dutch): 978-90-816501-1-3
ISBN (English): 978-90-816501-2-0

prices (inc postage and packaging) Netherlands: 36 euro
rest of Europe: 40 euro
rest of world: 45 euro
order from: smitaki@boomdistributiecentrum.nl

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2011

Beer

2011-02-04T00:05:00.000-08:00

(Tomatoes from the book Scatterlight Donkeys & Foxballs Ice Cream)

Last week the New York Times published an interesting article about a small beer brewer in Komotini, in the north of Greece, close to the Turkish border. 'What’s broken in Greece? Ask an Entrepeneur' was the title. It tells the story of Dimitri Politopoulos, who has been struggling for twelve years now to keep his brewery going. From his experience it seems it isn’t only foreigners looking to invest in Greece who are faced with a barrier of laws and rules - the Greeks themselves don’t have an easy life trying to make and sell products.

I wonder where all those dynamic Greek salesmen have gone, who were once at the flourishing heart of Smyrna (nowadays Izmir) during the days of the Ottoman Empire. It was the Greeks and Armenians who kept the economy booming in those days. After the fall of the empire and the creation of the Turkish state, the country was cleared of foreigners and the healthy economy was more or less destroyed.

Who does not know the story of the shipping giant Aristotle Onassis? He fled Turkey and very quickly built up an enormous shipping business, which made him one of the best known icons of modern Greece. Many Greeks also went to the United States where they too created all kinds of businesses. In those days it was still the land where dreams could come true and by hard work and good business decisions you could become a millionaire.

Not in Greece. Except for Onassis very few got rich by dint of their labours. And so it is today. The NYT article makes that clear. For example Mr Politopoulos wanted to brew a new kind of herbal tea made from plants which he grows in the mountains, but a Greek law forbids brewers to make anything but beer - a law dating back to the time when King Otto of Bavaria ruled Greece (1833–1862).

It was he who first introduced beer to Greece. It was after the time the main part of Greece was able to free itself from Ottoman rule and Otto (the second son of King Luther I of Bavaria) was installed by the European powers to be its ruler. He brought with him a royal Bavarian brewer named Fuchs. Otto, however was never very popular with the Greeks and was sent back home in 1862. However, Fuchs stayed and his son founded the first brewery in Greece, producing a beer he called FIX (after Fuchs).
However, if Mr Politopoulos wants to realise his dream of bottling a new herbal drink, he must first get the government to alter King Otto’s brewing law. We all can imagine what a long and tedious procedure that will be.

I do not drink much beer, although I do like it on a real hot summer’s day. Then I prefer the Mythos brand, the most popular of the Greek beers. They are not always available thanks to the Dutch beer giant Heineken which has grabbed 70% of the Greek beer business.

As far as I know there is no beer made here on Lesvos, but there are plenty of Greek brands from elsewhere: Fix Hellas, Athenian, Marathon, Zorbas, Alfa and Vergina, the beer made by Mr Politopoulos. Most are difficult to obtain but I think I once saw a bottle of Alfa on the island.

Everybody knows that Greek tomatoes - especially those from Lesvos - are much tastier than the Dutch variety, but did anyone ever get a chance to taste any beer other than Heineken or Amstel in Greece? I am sure that if you do find any this summer you will, like me, prefer Mythos (or one of the other Greek beers). As for Mr Politopoulos and his dream of brewing a tea from mountain herbs: a great idea and I really hope he will see this dream come true and if he ever comes to Lesvos, I will be happy to accept a case of his Vergina beer.

The law that says brewers can only make beer is not the only example of archaic legislation in Greece. There is another law that says donkeys are allowed to walk anywhere they like along the road - even highways. So while you will still encounter scatterlight donkeys on the track, they will also be in bookstores: my book Scatterlight Donkeys & Foxballs Ice Cream will be out very soon: check my blog for information on how to get a copy.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2011

Presidential mistakes

2011-01-27T02:52:00.000-08:00

Most people know who the premier of Greece is: Yorgos Papandreou. But lots of people forget that Greece also has a president - Karolos Papoulias. Unlike Papandreou he does not appear that often in the news and I must admit I would not recognize him if I bumped into him in the street. And yet he is the first citizen of Greece. Last week the president of Armenia was on an official visit to Athens and naturally he had a meeting with the Greek president. One of the things Papoulias said to him was: ‘We (meaning Greeks and Armenians) were slaughtered by the same barbarians.’

This was of course a totally bad diplomatic move. By ‘barbarians’ he meant neighbouring Turkey, with whom Greece already has a fragile relationship and so there were angry reactions and threats to call a halt to the traffic of Turkish tourist boats visiting the Greek islands of the Aegean.

Nowadays more and more Turks visit the Aegean islands, amongst others Lesvos, to enjoy the peace and quiet, the sun and sea. They are very friendly people who spend quite a bit of money here and a boycott would I am sure be a sad loss of income.

This incident might also damage current plans to organize boat excursions between north Lesvos and Turkey. Trips would depart from Petra harbour and go over the strait to Assos the old ‘twin’ city of Molyvos, which faces our villages of Argenos and Sykaminia.

In summer season there’s are regular boats from Mytilini to Dikili or Ayvalik - cute little towns where you can go shopping. Because Lesvos has no market, the one in Ayvalik is especially popular and even though you are not supposed to bring back fresh produce the boats are always full of Lesviots who have found bargains in Turkey.

A trip to Assos means more than getting a taste of Turkish atmosphere or kebabs. It’s a beautiful little town rather like Molyvos and has plenty of archaeological sites including a Doric temple dedicated to Athena (from 530 BC). The town was founded long before that by the Aeolian people from Mythimna. For a short time it was goverened by a student of Plato - Hermias of Atarneus. He encouraged philosophers to visit Assos, including Aristotle who even married Hermias’ daughter. The Persians conquered the region, only to be chased out by Alexander the Great. For a short time the kings of Pergamum reigned until the Romans came. After the fall of the Roman Empire the region was ruled from Byzantium (Constantinople/Istanbul), until the Ottomans arrived and later the state of Turkey was created.

At the end of the nineteenth century archaeologists found the old temple of Athena and many other treasures which ended up in the Louvre in Paris. As well as the temple there is also a polygonal wall, graves, and an open air theatre.

So as well as a trip to Turkey an excursion to Assos would attract people interested in ancient Greek culture - something that on Lesvos has either disappeared or is buried under the ground.

Maybe this sea traffic would also encourage the Lesviot municipality to restore the old Turkish baths in Molyvos. Then the Turks who come here can see some of their own old culture. The plans for their restoration have been on the table for years, and there was money for it, but up to now these once beautiful baths are just a Turkish ruin.

Fortunately, lots of Turkish travel agents are against the proposed boycott, so let’s hope this diplomatic spat will be quickly forgotten and that next summer will see plenty of Turkish tourists visiting Lesvos again. With a little bit of luck they might even find a newly restored Turkish bath house, and, in the other direction, you might extend your trip to the north of the island with a visit to the remains of Greek culture in Turkey.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2011

Molyvos

2011-01-21T00:16:00.000-08:00

(Photo of Molyvos from the book Scatterlight Donkeys & Foxballs Ice Cream)

Mithymna, nowadays mostly called Molyvos, has existed since at least a thousand years BC. They say the Aeolians founded this little city, just about the time they built Assos its twin which is still there on the other side of the sea in Turkey.

Mithymna is in the north of Lesvos and now has a medieval character and most of the remains of Aeolian life are buried deep beneath its grounds. It has narrow and steep cobblestone streets lined with old houses many with closed wooden verandas. At sea level there’s a cosy little harbour and a castle towers over everything. Molyvos is one of the major tourist attractions on Lesvos.

Mythimna used to be the second most important city (after the capital Mytilini) but nowadays it’s Kalloni followed by Plomari then Polichnitos. Thucydides (460-400 BC) and Xenophon (ca. 430–354 BC) both mentioned the role played by Mithymna in the Peloponnesian war (about 431–404 BC) and poets of ancient times often praised the quality of its wine.

Now there are no longer any significant vineyards around here and in the last century Mithymna was mostly a poor fishing village. Only since the last few decades did it become a little bit prosperous thanks to tourism; but fishing, sheep and goats and olive growing are still as well sources of income. When in 1462 the Ottoman Turks occupied the island, they renamed it Molyvos, and even after the island became Greek again in 1912, the name stuck. In the Sixties the village became a protected heritage - and still is - and was discovered by its first tourists. The hotel Delphinia was the only one to open in those days, but now there are plenty.

Molyvos is beautifully located on its grand promontory, almost encircled by the sea. There are plenty more Greek island villages with similar settings, notably Santorini, but what has surprised me is that we keep meeting people that come back every year - known as ‘repeaters’ - lots of whom have been coming for well over twenty years!

Some even came for the first time forty years ago and they have lovely stories about how Molyvos was then. They know exactly who was also there with them, especially those who stayed for months and months, sleeping on the beach or renting simple rooms or houses. They threw legendary parties, fell in love, painted and wrote poems and novels. It was like one big happening. Some people even talk about those times as if they were mythological. There was no need for a parking lot - there were hardly any cars on the roads which were mostly rough dirt. There was almost no hotel accommodation, transport was by donkey and going to Anaxos was a real adventure.

Of course, Molyvos has changed since then with many more new and restored houses around the village, but the surroundings are still unbelievably beautiful. Most tourists are satisfied and there are few complaints from the repeaters. Only in August can you expect big crowds, in the other summer months there are tourists, but life is still Greek and not overrun by masses of visitors.

People say that the place has something magical. That may be because Molyvos still remains a village where Greeks work and live and where the streets have not become totally touristic. Molyvos is still small scale and, in fact, nowhere on the island will you find the towers of multi-storey hotels.

Around the village there is plenty of nature: one step out of the village and you are in land where sheep and goats roam and quietness rules, especially on the high tops of Mt Lepetymnos and among the many olive groves. From the village you have an astounding view over the northwest coast of the island and behind the village, on the north coast, there are pebbled beaches with crystal clear water, the hot springs of Eftalou, and a brilliant view of Turkey. What else would you want for your holiday setting?

I cannot say exactly why Molyvos has its special appeal, but I know a certain peace reigns here, which is not easy to find in other holiday destinations. It is a friendly and beautiful medieval village where life goes on, untouched by the hectic stress of the big cities like Athens. Greeks like to come here too, strolling through the streets, taking coffee in the harbour while the sun sets amongst the masts of the fishing boats, or dining at one of the many the waterside restaurants. Molyvos is a place where you can enjoy life.

This winter commercial people, all in tourism, came together to talk about how to make Molyvos even more attractive and to aid them they have created an online survey asking for comments and opinions - it’s at MyMolyvos.com. As well as wanting to know why Molyvos is such a magical place, they want to know the dislikes too and what you think can be improved. Well, those are big questions.

I for instance hate the way garbage is burned in autumn and which sometimes goes on throughout winter. And a veterinarian would be an addition to the community to bring in a decent sterilisation program for all stray dogs and cats, which for years now has been done only by residents.

Maybe you can describe the beauty of Molyvos in one sentence, or you have things you dislike about the village. Now you have a chance to write your opinion so that Molyvos can become more like you want it.

I hesitated a bit to mention this survey. I want Molyvos to stay this friendly and quiet, and not be changed into a tourist fair by the arrival of thousands more people - especially those who prefer to stay in all-included hotels. Those who want more fish & chips shops, discos and bigger hotels, please don’t bother to fill in this survey!

Survey about Molyvos (http://www.mymolivos.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=716:a-questionnaire-about-molivos)

Winter sun

2011-01-14T01:47:00.000-08:00

When in summer the sky is bright blue and temperatures warm, there is no reason to cheer about it because we have that kind of weather for months here in Greece. But as soon as summer is over every blue sky day is cherished as if it were the last.

There are some real differences between nice days in summer and those in autumn, winter and spring. In colder months the landscape is quite different and the light seems warmer. In fact, even at the end of August there’s a bit of moisture in the air that gives the light its rosy tinge and affects nature’s autumnal colours..

In contrast, during the winter the island is bright green and on sunny days it’s quite a sight. I assume it’s the angle of the sun as it’s lower in the sky that makes the light seem warmer. This is why you can’t get enough of the way winter sun brings out the island’s green colours and the blue of the sea.

The prime times are the Alkyonides days: the warm period in January, when the sky is clear and there is no wind. These are best winter days in Greece. They feel like summer, or spring, and even bring wild flowers into bloom.

I thought the Alkyonides Days were named after the myth of Alcyone, daughter of the wind god Aeolus (see: Alkyonides Days). But there is another legend to explain them: Alcyoneus was one of the Titans of Thrace, mythical men-gods who tried to revolt against the gods of Olympos. They were led by Alcyoneus who would be an immortal only as long as he stayed in his own country of Pallene. The tenth labour set for Heracles was to steal the cattle of another giant, Geryonos. To defend him Alcyoneus fought with Heracles who wounded him, then secreted him out of his home country, which is why he died. His seven daughters - the Alcyonides - were so saddened they threw themselves into the sea and drowned. However, Amphitrite the wife of Poseidon took pity and changed them into kingfishers.

So we have two nice stories to explain these lovely annual Alkyonides days (it’s rare but in some years we don’t get them). People also know such days after an old name for kingfisher - halcyon days. Halcyon is the family name of the kingfisher strain which includes Halcyon albiventris (brown-hooded kingfisher), the Halcyon coromanda (ruddy kingfisher) and even a Halcyon Smyrnensis (white-throated kingfisher).

I have not found a mythological story to explain eclipses of the sun -although fighting armies are thought to have ceased hostilities during an eclipse because they thought it was a sign of a god. Herodotus wrote that the long running war between the Lydians and Medes was ended in 585 BC because of an eclipse. But that is actual history and no myth.

A partial eclipse occurred a few days ago. This was before the cloudless Alkyonides days had arrived, so spectators couldn’t get a good clear view of it. Jan went on the road really early - even before the sun was up - but was lucky. He drove to Sarakina (the region around Palios) and there the clouds parted enough for him to take some beautiful pictures of the sun being eaten by the moon.

According to Theophrastus (371–287 BC) in his lifetime the astronomer Matriketas had an observatory on Mt Lepetymnos where he studied the sun. Not much is known about him but I can imagine during the Alkyonides Days he would have been glued to his telescope. Normally, there are a few clouds up there, but these days the tops reach into a clear blue sky.

Last Thursday - January 6th - most Greeks were able to enjoy some really beautiful Alkyonides weather because it was the holiday of Epiphany, the day on which it is believed Christ was revealed to be the son of God. It is the day the three wise men (or kings) from the east arrived to honour the baby Jesus (in other countries they celebrate it as Three Kings day).

But why is it in Greece that water is blessed at Epiphany? Perhaps because the baptism of Christ in the river Jordan is also celebrated at this time. Everywhere in Greece on this day there will be extended church celebrations followed by processions through the villages to anywhere there is water. The priests lead the way, then the officials with power, then the ordinary folk. And if there is no water to go to, they will visit a baptistry. The priests bless the water and everything floating on it. They then throw a cross into it - which is supposed to be retrieved by a brave diver who is not afraid of the cold. I do not know if a cross is ever thrown into the baptistry, but I guess if it is, the priest can easily fish it out for himself.

So, you can see it’s a busy time for photographers: the beautiful light of the Alkyonides days, the solar eclipse and Greeks parading through the streets in their very best clothes. We are on our way to summer, but even though it might seem like spring, it’s really still winter.

Seal island

2011-01-05T03:50:00.000-08:00

On New Years Eve I always think back to the nights I spent in Amsterdam when there were fireworks and lots of people on the streets celebrating. But there’s nothing better than to wake up on new years morning on this Greek island. On the last day of the old year the weather was beautiful, and so it was on January 1, 2011- clear with a bright blue sky and a warm sun shedding a light I wished could stay forever. All trace of summer heat waves long forgotten and thanks to a dose of flu, I did not have a champagne hangover.

Amongst all the dark news about political tension, tax assessments, trouble during New Years Eve and other cheerless messages there was one bit story which shone out like a ray of sunshine offering hope for the new year: researchers have found a new colony of seals, not hiding away in caves as is the usual case in southern Europe, but living openly on an island (kept secret). These carefree seals were found sunbathing as they once all did before they learned to be afraid of people. The scientists are very happy with this discovery.

I too was sunbathing in a chair on the January 1 and can imagine how those seals might feel on their remote (and secret) beach, lolling around on the warm sand enjoying the sun just like me and no doubt dreaming about a year with plenty of fish.

The Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus) is a threatened species that survives along some shores of the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and parts of Africa’s Atlantic coast. Altogether between four and six hundred are left of what was once an abundant species.

In Roman and medieval times they were hunted for their skins and fat (for lamp oil) but luckily not to the point of extinction. That happened in more modern times - they were so curious they were easy to hunt. So nowadays you seldom get a glimpse of them.

You occasionally do meet to people on this island who say they have come across one of these monk seals, or even bumped into one in the water, an encounter which I imagine might give anyone a bit of a fright.

Across from Lesvos in Turkey the little city of Foça was once a Greek settlement called Phokaia, named after the Greek word for seal. There are still some of these seals around there and Foca is now is the base for Turkey’s organisation for the protection of the Mediterranean monk seal.

The seals used to be protected by Apollo and Poseidon, because they loved to sunbathe and swim and whenever you saw a seal it was supposed to bring you luck, but there’s not much chance of that today. So let’s look on the find of the unknown colony as a token of luck for the new year. Greece has well over six thousand islands, some 227 inhabited by people, and so the big mystery is: on which one are these seals hiding? I do not think it can be Lesvos, but might be near here because we are just across the water from Foca. So, if you do have the rare opportunity of seeing seals casually sunbathing on a remote island or a faraway beach around here - don’t say a word to anyone!

A HAPPY 2011!

Don’t forget to take a look at my new book: Scatterlight Donkeys & Foxballs Ice Cream.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2011

Scatterlight Donkeys & Foxballs Ice Cream

2010-12-27T01:13:00.000-08:00

Because I am working hard finishing the book of my columns I will write no more for this year. The book includes many photographs taken by Jan van Lent and to keep you informed about its making I have started a new blog which over the coming weeks gives you information about Scatterlight Donkeys & Foxballs Ice Cream. I hope, the book will be published at the end of January 2011.

A Merry Christmas & a Happy New year

Καλά Χριστούγεννα
&
Καλή Χρονιά

Stay-at-Home-Week

2010-12-16T00:58:00.001-08:00

(The harbour of Mytilini)

It cannot be always summer. So after a night of 19°C, the temperature dropped quickly and the next night it was freezing: so coooooold!

Winter clothes were brought out of the closet, gloves and woollen caps were dug out of remote corners and the fireplace put into action: suddenly it was winter! Up in the mountains snow and ice made the roads treacherous, and although the temperature did move off zero, snow showers kept people off the roads in Skalochori, and Mt Lepetymnos is slowly turning white. The forecast is not so good: winter weather will keep on playing tricks in the coming week.

The day before yesterday a hard north wind drove ice cold waves over the Eftalou boulevard making the already damaged road even worse. On Samos a state of emergency was called when the sea swamped the main quay of the harbour making it impassable for pedestrians and cars. Troops had to be called in to protect the city with sandbags.

Yesterday was a cold but nice day in Eftalou and when the sun drove most of the clouds away the sea seemed to settle. However, in Mytilini a cargo boat from Chios trying to negotiate the port entrance rammed into a jetty damaged several trucks and spilled oil into the harbour. Luckily the Mytilini emergency services are prepared for such calamities and within a few hours the breach was closed, the oil cleaned up and environmental disaster avoided.

Athens also felt the sudden drop in temperature and some parts got a layer of snow. Aside from the weather the capital (and the rest of the country) is facing a difficult week with a big program of daily strikes.

December 14: the banks will strike for 48 hours, so for two days no-one can access their money. Here on the island it’s not so much of a problem because shops and businesses will let you pay later.

There’s also a three hours strike planned by private sector unions. I have no idea what that will mean - it could mean people will just take a longer lunch hours, between noon and three o’clock. It seems to be more like a general exercise for a strike because…

On December 15 the private unions will strike for up to 24 hours. We still won’t be able to tell exactly who is following these private unions and their strike because that same day public officials will also stay at home. The stoppage includes air traffic controllers so we can forget flying to Athens for a day’s shopping. And there’ll be no inter-island travel either - the ferries won’t be weighing anchor for 24 hours. Any attempt to sue the state or the unions won’t go far because lawyers won’t be at work either. Even if you wanted to make a noise in the street to express your anger against the strikers, no-one would know because the journalists are also on strike. So no newspapers or television news - which is not so bad because everybody can easily imagine what the day will be like: chaos in Athens and most people spending the day at home.

December 16: There will be no public transport for the whole day. It won’t be so bad here on the island because there is hardly any public transport anyway.

December 17 & 18: ‘Journalists’ will be on strike for 48 hours, although I think it’s more likely to be support workers because I don’t think journalists will really strike - they are too curious about what is happening. But anyhow, we will not miss the efforts of reporters: they usually bring bad news and anyway, these days we have internet and Wikileaks to give us much more interesting news.

(With thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

Olive-beat

2010-12-14T00:44:00.000-08:00

It is not easy to write something new every week about life on the island when nothing much happens or where the highlights like celebrations and harvests come at the same time every year. At the moment, as always, people are busy with the olive harvest and every time you visit a friend you are more than likely given a bottle of newly pressed oil. It is so good could you could just drink it straight down. It smells like fresh herbs and I understand why people who take their oil from the mill immediately open the barrel to get a first taste.

The mill will have already told them what quality their pressing is - it always depends on how quickly (and when) it’s been harvested. Mostly the nets will have been spread under the trees for weeks, so that older olives will be mixed together with the newly fallen fruit. Oil made from this mix will be reasonable in quality but not the best. Oil made from the first fall only will be of low quality, but when the last fruit that ripens is quickly brought to the mill there’s a good chance it will be a very good oil.

So, the harvest has to be well organised, and the mill has to be told well in advance when the sacks are coming, or they will have to wait in line. Any delay will affect the quality - the more time between harvest and press the higher will be the level of acidity .The best oil comes from olives pressed the same day they are harvested.

However, even if there is a wait of a few days and your harvest is a hodgepodge of olives fallen off the trees at different times, your oil will always be better than anything you buy in a supermarket.

The actual time of the harvest also affects the product. As they ripen, olives turn from green to black and some people - in Greece and Italy - like them to be still a little green when pressed, whereas the Spanish prefer oil made when they are harvested late and very dark. Moroccans leave the olives in barrels until they are almost spoiled before they press them, so their oil is even heavier. Their preference indicates taste rather than quality to be the deciding factor.

And then there is the weather. In the Netherlands, even if it snows, or rains ice or it’s foggy and damp, people will always go to work because they are used to slipping around on the ice; but if it rains in Greece, there will be no harvesting. It’s not because the Greeks don’t like the wet, but because, they say, harvesting in wet weather will yield only poor quality oil. Why that is I don’t quite know.

Harvesting olives is not that complicated, but there are some rules you need to know. I like this time of year, but not stumbling across the nets being careful not to step on the olives.

So the winter storms don’t blow them away the nets are held down by stones, but in the groves where there are no stones to be found solutions have to be more creative. I have seen nets held in place by bright pink plastic bags full of sand, like a nice art project. The nets always used to be black but nowadays they come in all colours, green, orange, even red; but I don’t like red or green nets. They are so unnatural they hurt your eyes, and anyway. I like passing through olive country where the nets are black: they give the countryside a shiny gloss.

I have no olive trees so I don’t have to organise a harvest, which can be a nice thing to do for a few days, and although I am not much good at it I like to help friends and neighbours with their work. However, people with hundreds of trees or children who had to help each year with their parents’ harvest of their liquid gold, probably have nightmares as the time approaches. Check out: Why I dread the Olive Harvest.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

St Tax

2010-12-01T07:17:00.000-08:00

Last week in the western Polish city of Swiebodzin, the tallest statue of Christ was finished. It is as many metres high as the number of years that Jesus lived - three metres higher than the famous Brazilian statue of Christ that towers over Rio de Janeiro. According to Poland’s bishop Stefan Regmunt the statue is a clear sign of the people’s faith in Christ.

On Lesvos they do not need such a huge demonstration of faith. Here they just keep on building little churches. In the most remote spots, on tops of the mountains or just in somebody’s back garden you will find them, and I do not exaggerate when I say that there are more than a thousand of them on Lesvos.

The biggest concentration is at the Limonas monastery, where there is a project to build a church dedicated to every Christian saint - dozens of little churches already surround the main monastery and the plan is as ambitious as the building of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

Greeks are not megalomaniacs. The grandest Orthodox churches ever built are mostly in Russia - as big as huge palaces. However, inside a Greek church you will find an awful lot of gold and other glittery decorations: it is through your senses that you feel the presence of God and the more those senses are stimulated, the better you feel His presence.

Prince Vladimir of Kiev (c 958–1015) believed in pagan gods. On one occasion he was looking for a human being to sacrifice in their honour and came across Ioann, son of Fyodor, a Christian who proclaimed his belief only in one God and told Vladimir his pagan gods were vassals of the devil. There was no way he would allow his son to be sacrificed to them. In those days, most Russian people followed the pagan way and so father and son were both killed. Now Fyodor and Ioann are seen as the first martyrs of the Russian Orthodox church.

Prince Vladimir was haunted by what happened and sent his people to other countries to study their faiths. Only when his messengers came back from Constantinople did he change his own belief. His messengers had visited a celebration at the Byzantium Hagia Sophia, a church so brilliantly decorated that they testified: ‘We were not sure if we were in heaven or on earth’. In 988 Vladimir had himself baptised, after which he married a Byzantine princess named Anna, set about the demolition of all pagan shrines and started building Orthodox churches and monasteries, styled like the one on Mt Athos in Greece.

When you enter a big Greek Orthodox church you immediately notice all its gold and glamour, the chandeliers decorated with crystal and the many icons and paintings on the walls but the little churches don’t all have this glamorous allure. A church used to be built for worshipful services or to house the relics of a saint which many have hidden in their inner sanctums. However, I doubt every one of them has one here, otherwise Lesvos would be would be a much more holy island. In the small churches there are no regular services - only once a year on the name day of the saint to whom they are dedicated.

And we shouldn’t confuse these small churches with the tiny chapels you see everywhere by the side of the road. They are memorials to the victims of road accidents.

Over the centuries, many of the older little churches have become derelict. There are twelve Byzantine churches listed on the hundred most endangered world monuments. While the old churches decay, new ones are being built – thanks to a saint who cured somebody, or because a family prospered. However, there is no saint to help you to pay your taxes and last week all self-employed workers were hit with huge assessments, even people who had gone out of business years ago. If you made a profit of 500 euro you now have to pay double in tax. They say a man in Plomari was so disturbed by his assessment he hanged himself.

Skipping tax assessments has long been a national sport here, which has now got a lot more interesting. Lots of people just ignore this new special assessment - called pereosi forologikon ipotheseon literally ‘the finishing business tax’. If you don’t want to pay it you risk the tax people auditing your books and accounts, and only if you have nothing to hide will your tax payments be small. However, even if you played foul, the fine you will have to pay might be less than your new assessment!

To emerge from its economic crisis the Greek government needs to perform the labours of Hercules. If there was a saint who helped people pay their taxes they would build an awful lot of churches, but sadly, he doesn’t exist. Or, if the Greek premier Papandreou successfully lifts this country out of the dust, he could be canonised as a saint. But for the moment even the building of new churches has stopped.

(With thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

Shall we skip winter?

2010-11-25T04:30:00.000-08:00

(the gulf of Kalloni)

This beautiful autumn seems endless. You can’t call it an Indian summer, because the humid nights, the fallen leaves and huge numbers of mushrooms are clear signs that it’s really autumn. However, every day the temperature climbs above 20°C and people are still swimming in the warm blue sea. Having lunch in the sunshine is also a treat: lots of Greeks and a few tourists are taking advantage of the conditions especially on Sundays and all the outdoor areas of the waterside restaurants that don’t close for winter are packed with people.

The olive harvest started early this year and most trees have lots of fruit. Everywhere you hear the ‘rickety-tick’ of the sticks people use to knock down the olives, and around the trees, people picking the olives off the ground. On the roads you meet cars loaded with sacks full on their way to the olive press where you can see them stacked in huge piles waiting to be processed. Sometimes you may even hear a vacuum cleaner being used to suck up the olives - by someone too tired or unwilling to bend down any more.

The light has a warm glow and it is great weather for walking. The trees which are shedding their leaves are beautiful and so are the scenes made by the rays of the sun. Up in the woods above Anemotia or Vatera, or in the forests around Agiasos, you will come across more cars, full of families, or just men and women, who stop and race into the woods with baskets to collect mushrooms. Their tracks are obvious because when they stop to check mushrooms for worms they cut them and chuck away the bits they don’t want - so like Tom Thumb you can follow the tracks of rejected mushrooms, but you won’t find any for yourself.

When there is no wind the gulfs of Gera and of Kalloni are like turquoise mirrors, their surfaces disturbed only by fishes gulping for a bit of fresh air. Small white clouds are reflected in the water, and at the salt lakes of Skala Polichnitou flamingos have returned to walk proudly on their long legs through the shallow water.

There are no shellfish on offer because there’s a ban on catching them - too much cadmium - although levels of salmonella, coliform and lead are said to be okay. Both fishermen and people who love to eat shellfish are disappointed.

However, the splendour of autumn has been spoiled by a fire at the Molyvos garbage dump. Unlucky the houses that are in the wrong wind direction, they have been shrouded in an evil smelling cloud and people have had to keep their doors and windows tight shut and you wouldn’t venture outside without covering your mouth and nose with a cloth - in such fine weather! The Mayor said it was not his decision and blamed farmers for the disaster. Throwing earth on the fire didn’t help and so for weeks we’ve had this stench. The Mayor has promised that next year there won’t be a problem because there will be a proper waste disposal plant. But who believes him? He is the last Mayor of Molyvos whose position disappears in January, after which the whole of Lesvos will have one municipal council, and only one mayor based in Mytilini. These are the moments when you don’t want to live on this island, as such a beautiful place is ruined by people who have no idea what to do with their garbage.

Each time rain is predicted the heap spontaneously bursts into flames - like today. Even though the forecast was bad, the day was splendid, except for the foul smell of burning plastic. A southerly wind chased the clouds high above the mountains but the rain stayed away. Thankfully the wind was strong enough to blow away the fumes and smells.

While I was walking and looking for mushrooms, I suddenly spied a delicious fat shoot of asparagus. So instead of chasing mushrooms I went after more asparagus and, sure enough, found more shoots that were too impatient to wait for spring.

The anemones are also in a hurry. A week ago I saw some already opening their buds and there are little fields full of them. How can we cope with all these people impatiently setting fire to the garbage and an environment that won’t wait for spring?

I love the winter. I love to sit near the fire as the rain drums against the windows and the wind howls around the house. But when you see so many signs of a spring (I’ve even seen a Shaggy Cistus with an open flower) you have to ask yourself the same question as those asparagus shoots and early anemones: shall we skip winter?

(With thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

Imperial mushrooms

2010-11-18T00:10:00.000-08:00

(a Caesar's amanite)

After all these years I finally found the most popular (and common) mushroom on the island: the Peppery milk cap (Lactarius pepersaus), in Greek peperites or (in local language) pefrites. I knew they grew under pine trees and that if you see a small pile of earth you have to dig for them and yesterday, in the huge pine forest above Anemotia, we saw these little mounds everywhere, including one enormous specimen (they grow twenty to be thirty cms across!).

It is amazing to realize how these sturdy milk caps find the force to lift themselves through the earth. You could use them to dig your garden! I understand now why Greeks often say they come home with several kilos of mushrooms. Some of them are so heavy I bet four would weigh a kilo.

Although I see on internet that these white peperites are not valued as a top culinary dish, it is nevertheless the mushroom that is eaten most on Lesvos. However, there are other kinds of less abundant milk cap to be found that taste even better. For example, we also found the Lactarius sanguifluus (in Dutch the Blood milk cap) and the Lactarius deliciosus, the Saffron milk cap.

The Lactarius sanguifluus looks quite scary: it is bright red and green - not colours you’d like to cook with - and yet it is more valued for its taste than its milk white cousins. I prefer the Saffron milk cap and actually fell in love with it because it reminds me of mandarins. Cut the stem, and the outer ring is bright orange. However, when you clean them for cooking parts can turn bright green. According to mushroom fanciers it has less flavour than the Lactarius sanguifluus.

There’s quite a debate about which is the most delicious mushroom: porcino or ceps (Boletus edulis) or Caesar’s mushroom (Amanita caesarea).

The ceps I know from Holland and Belgium: a real treat and easy to recognize and a few years ago we found some marvellous ones above Agiasos, but never since. Most likely we’ve been looking at the wrong time of year.

I had seen Caesar’s mushroom before, but never eaten it. This orange-red mushroom does its name proud. Maybe it was named after Julius Caesar, or, for its taste which makes it the ‘emperor’ of the Amanita family? The Romans called it boletus and in 54 BC it caused the death of one emperor. Claudius who had taken power after his nephew Caligula was murdered loved both mushrooms and women. His fourth wife was Agripinna who, before they married, already had a son, Nero. She promised him he would be emperor and persuaded Claudius to recognize him as the official heir to the throne. However, Agripinna was impatient for Claudius to die and served him a meal of his favourite Caesar’s mushrooms into which she had sneaked in a few Death caps (Amanita phalloides). That was how Nero came to power.

Amongst the milk caps we also found some Caesar’s mushrooms, which with their red caps were easy to spot in the autumn landscape. Compared to the world famous, and poisonous Fly amanita (Amanita muscaria - and also known as Fly agaric) which is red with white spots, Caesar’s has no red spots and the under part of its cap and the stem are orange. And it’s one of the world’s tastiest.

I am not a hero when it comes to eating mushrooms I do not know and when looking for ceps, I know to leave the red ones alone. So eating red Caesar’s mushrooms was quite an adventure. My host baked them with cheese, cream and cognac and they were excellent. The orange of the mushroom dish made a great contrast with the green and white of a dish of rice and chard, another with red beets and a salad of fennel and oranges.

At the end of this delicious feast one of the other guests felt faint and although we trusted our host’s knowledge of edible mushrooms, we couldn’t help thinking maybe some of them might have been poisonous. I imagined us all being rushed to hospital, so we quickly looked on the internet to check symptoms of mushroom poisoning. Feeling faint was not included and when the doctor finally arrived it was found to be a case of low blood pressure.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

At you the choice

2010-11-10T23:42:00.000-08:00

(Mytilini, the capital of Lesvos)

The advantage of living on an island is that you feel far away from the hectic world where the important things are decided. Especially these last days when the weather has been incredible beautiful: high temperatures with the sun trying to dry out the humidity which makes mysterious foggy shapes out of the mountains.

However, thanks to the letter bombs addressed to heads of states and foreign embassies, the Greek capital has been in uproar. The international post was shut down for 48 hours but here at the Molyvos post office mail going to foreign countries has been taken in as usual. Let’s see how far the post will come these days.

Some of the packets were sent by courier services and normally would be delivered within a day. However, when the Speedex company had to bring my new computer from Athens to Lesvos, they took their time. First it went to Patras (how could you confuse Patras with Mytilini?!) When that mistake was discovered the computer stayed a day in Patras before going back to Athens where it stayed another day. Only then was it shipped to Lesvos. The boat arrived at seven in the morning, and you might think that somebody at the courier service would jump into a car to deliver the package to me - it was already three days late. But that was too much to be expected. When I phoned Speedex in Mytilini the employee I spoke to took no interest in my problem and told me there was no way they would deliver it the same day: maybe tomorrow or the day after!

Unfortunately, this lack of service is still common in too many Greek companies (especially those still state owned). Sometimes you think you live in a communistic country where the workers are not interested at all in their work but do everything that make the hours pass as pleasantly and quickly as possible.

Yesterday, this kind of apathy was confirmed by the results of Sunday’s local elections: only 54 % of the Greeks voted. There was even a village in the northwest – Velvendos - that broke a new record. Protesting against the new Kallikrates project 95.77 % of the villagers stayed at home! Greeks are tired of change and don’t believe in the government’s solution to the crisis. They also don’t think it’s possible to prevent politicians and other people with power from putting money into their own pockets, or that the workers will forever continue doing jobs for slave’s wages, or that anybody can get Greece out of this crisis.

However, these elections have shown that small parties - left wing or green parties – are gaining more and more votes which means more Greeks believe that by not voting for the two main parties (Pasok and Neo Dimokratia), they can change the country.

On Sunday there was indeed a lot to decide. Not only was there the choice between parties, but elections according to the new Kallikrates system took place. This means that Lesvos is no longer part of a regional island group including Limnos and Ai Stratis, but is now also with Samos, Chios and Ikaria. So people had to choose a new governor for this expanded group. Kallikrates also meant that our island’s local municipalities were also disbanded, so that now there is only one authority and again, for this a mayor had to be elected - plus a deputy and the entire council from very long lists of candidates. Each of the old municipal districts had to vote for a representative on the central council. It was the same everywhere in Greece because the national government wants this Kallikrates system to save billions of euros.

On the topic of economics, here on the street these days there are more and more people riding horses or donkeys. Will the crisis bring back the old ways of getting around? People also fear that the price of heating fuel has risen so far they won’t be able to afford it for the coming winter, so I think in a lot of houses we’ll see a return to the old wood stoves. Another sign: although the ban on public smoking is opposed by Greeks many have stopped because it’s also become far too expensive.

So, we are facing a hard winter. Although some people are cheered up by the prospect of a good olive harvest - the trees are heavy with fat and juicy fruit ready for the olive press - this year rather than paying people to do the work, many will be doing their own harvesting. This is how people are forced to face the crisis: spending less and working more. And now we have to wait and see how it will work with only one mayor for the whole island. I am wondering if such a mayor, living far away in Mytilini, will take notice that the road here in Eftalou has not been repaired since the storm damage of last winter. Do we have to wait until the road disappears completely into the sea so that people living here can only get to Molyvos via the coastal road to Sykaminia?

(With thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

IN MEMORIAM: ANDONIS

2010-11-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

(the house of Andonis)

The Greek Olympos had that many gods they sometimes get into your head. I have tried hard to learn all their names and connections but if you are not careful you make mistakes and mix them up. When writing my last column about quinces I said that the goddess Aphrodite distributed lots of golden apples. However, she only gave away three – to Hippomenes – and although she played a part in story of the apple that (eventually) started the Trojan war, she was not the one who threw it into the crowd of wedding guests. That was Eris, the goddess of strife. So I was very sloppy writing this and I apologise (see my story about Apples from Lesvos).

There are many stories about the man I am going to write about now, but I choose only to pass on what I know to be facts and leave darker stories for what they are.

Everybody who has been to Eftalou, knows this man or at least the place where he lived: close to the Panselinos hotel between the road and the sea there is a complex of shabby structures made out of drift wood where a bent old man lived with dozens of dogs and cats: Andonis. You could only see what lay behind those shacks if you looked at them from the sea. It was a tiny stone house in which this man from Molyvos used to live.

Adonis was born by the sea here in Eftalou where he grew up with his brothers and sisters, together, it’s said, with lots of cats and dogs with which they slept to keep warm in winter.

Andonis married and had children but although his wife had a house in Molyvos, Andonis preferred to live in his little house by the sea and refused to abandon his many cats and dogs.

He was crazy about his animals and whenever he thought somebody might harm them – even if it were an unsuspecting tourist trying to stroke one of his cats – he might suddenly appear, screaming and rushing to save his beloved animal from the hands of a quite innocent animal lover.

If a cat got lost pandemonium broke out and he would run into the garden of the hotel, cursing people because he was sure it had been kidnapped by a tourist. His love for his animals had no limits, neither did the number of strays he took in. Early every morning his wife would come from Molyvos with food for him and all his charges.

Andonis came from a fishing family and he loved going out to sea to catch more food for his animals. Maybe that is how he met the seagull which for years lived at his little jetty, and was always there when he’d been fishing.

Even when big storms blew in the winter, no-one could get him to move into the village. His sons would beg him but he stayed with his animals. In the end it was cancer that made him move out. Two summers ago he started going home to his wife in the evenings, and last winter he no longer stayed at his seaside home with his animals. Although they were still fed by his family, they were in truth abandoned. And this is why they became the terror of the Eftalou boulevard. On the internet they became known as the ‘hellhounds of Eftalou’!

It is a very sad story because the abandoned dogs eventually ate the cats and then ran wild. They still lived on the street but some were not quick enough to jump away when cars sped by. Somebody even put poison down — and so last summer there were only six left.

As they roamed around and their territory expanded, they even came and killed one of my cats and, although I will never forgive the way they tore it to pieces, my heart still bleeds as I hear them barking and struggling to survive without their master.

One week ago the cancer finally took Andonis away and his dogs will never see their master again. It is likely that they will be taken to an animal shelter so that Eftalou will be safe again. Even though they were a real plague these last years, I will miss them, as I do Andonis. We will never see his crooked old back shuffling along the boulevard; we will never hear his shouts when he lost a cat or a dog did something he didn’t like. We will never speak to him when he was sitting at his little house, secretly eyeing the wandering tourists. He would always answer me with an avalanche of Greek words, most of which I never understood — and Andonis loved to talk.

One of his dogs has a new home at my place and I dearly hope that the others find places to live and people to look after them; and that Andonis too has found peace without his animals. Even though his dogs caused us many problems we shall miss this icon of Eftalou. So I am wondering if there are dogs and cats in the timeless fishing grounds where he now is. Goodbye, Andonis, I wish you well.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

From what fruit took Eve a bite?

2010-10-23T00:41:00.000-07:00

(Quinces)

The Tree of Knowledge, Good and Evil or Forbidden Fruit stood in the Garden of Eden, where, according to the Bible’s book of book Genesis the first people lived: Adam and Eve. However, they were expelled from paradise because Eve could not restrain herself from eating the ‘forbidden fruit’.

Historians keep asking themselves: from what fruit did Eve take the bite? Was it an apple, a grape, a pomegranate, a fig or maybe a quince?

These historians are always busy wondering about fruit: what were the mythological golden apples that grew in the famous gardens of the Hesperides? These were the ones Herakles had to steal (but first he had to kill the dragon which was guarding them).

Aphrodite threw a golden apple amongst the guests at a wedding to which she was not invited, thus (indirectly) setting off the Trojan War. She also gave three golden apples to young Hippomenes who used them to defeat the goddess Atalanta during a foot race. Atalanta had to marry the man who could beat her, but when Hippomenes dropped the apples (one by one) she couldn’t resist stopping to pick them up, and so lost and had to marry him.

The question remains: were all these mythical apples from the garden of Eden, the Hesperides or the ones thrown by Aphrodite real, or were they made of gold, or were they really oranges or, as some people believe, quinces?

Lesvos has just had its first serious autumn rain, a blessing for the olives as some trees are so heavy with fruit they were desperate for water. The figs have all gone, but a few unpicked grapes are withering on their vines. The first chestnuts are falling, but most remarkable are the yellow-gold coloured quinces that you see everywhere around the island and yet few people ever pick them.

Through in western Europe and north America the quince is a forgotten fruit. It originally came from the Caucasus, and centuries before Christ it was known in Arab and Greek kitchens, and later in the Roman kitchens. The Roman cook and gastronome Marcus Gavius Apicius describes several quince dishes in De Re Coquinaria, which is maybe the oldest recipe book we now know.

However, the quince is not such an easy fruit to cook, which may explain why in the era of fast food it is not popular. If Eve really did take a bite from a quince she would have needed strong teeth, because it is like concrete if try and eat it straight from the tree. Botanists think there may have been a softer version in ancient times, because the one we know can only be eaten and enjoyed once it’s cooked. It’s taste is somewhere between an apple and a pear but it also has a magic fragrance. As well as a delicacy the quince was often used as an air refresher!

In ancient Greece, the quince was a symbol of love and people would throw quinces at newlyweds setting off in their carriage - and the pair were supposed to eat at least one to sweeten their breath. The bride then counted the pips to see how many children she would bear - a strange tradition because a quince has so many pips you wouldn’t wish that many children on any woman. The Romans also thought the quince was a symbol of love and gave them when they got engaged.

None of these customs are remembered now; the quince has lost its reputation as a good luck token and has even been forgotten as a tasty fruit and so is not much harvested in Greece. Unlike walnuts, grapes and olives, quinces are left hanging on their trees.

It is said that Charlemagne introduced the quince to France and Germany. In 812 in his Capitulare de Villis he ordered that everywhere in his empire gardens should be made to grow vegetables and fruit trees and the quince was amongst the names of seventy plants he listed. In France they still make and enjoy a beautiful quince liqueur - liqueur de coing.

The Portuguese used to love quinces otherwise we might not have had marmalade. The Portuguese name for quince is marmelo and the original marmalade was quince jam. The quince we know today - Cydonia oblonga – is named after the ancient city of Kydonia in Crete, now called Chania. The English used to make excellent jellies and jams from quinces, but, perhaps because of the cooler climate, they are not easy to find in England.

A quince tree loves warmth but is also is pretty resistant to cold - an ideal fruit for the Mediterranean climate, but a nightmare for cooks who have forgotten how to preserve fruit.

Last week a friend came with a big box full of them. I was a bit alarmed because I know how difficult it is to make them into a preserve. Actually, because they are so hard, cutting them up into slices is quite dangerous: you could easily chop off a piece of finger!

However the rewards are very sweet. Jam, jelly and liqueur are quite easy to make and as the Dutch expression goes: it’s like ‘an angel pissing on your tongue’. Here is an easy recipe for Persian quince jelly,

Peel the quinces and cut them in small parts. Put everything in a pan and add water until they are just covered. Add two cardamom seeds per quince. Cook until the fruit is soft (1–1.5 hours). Put the mixture in a cloth in a pan overnight so that all the juice comes out. In the morning weight the juice and add an equal weight of sugar then boil it until it thickens to a jelly. Pour into sterilised jars, close the jars and cool.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

Send me a postcard, darling

2010-10-14T00:21:00.000-07:00

(Portret of Theophilos at Karini)

When I was a child, there was no television and I could not yet read the papers, the first images I saw from far away exotic countries came with postcards. Do you remember pictures of Spanish dancers (with real fabric skirts!), a donkey with a straw hat, mountains and bright blue lakes, a Laplander in colourful costume or a group of Greek women dressed for dancing?

In those days the postman would often bring cards from friends or family on holidays, but these days the post box remains pretty empty and you only get cars for your birthday or at Christmas. I have to admit that long ago when I was on holiday I took a long list of friends and family with me to whom I had to send a card and spent at least an afternoon writing them all. Now we send emails or we phone to let the people at home know our holiday is going well.

So old postcards have now become collectors items and sometimes represent a little piece of history. You now can find such relics of old Lesvos - including black and white pictures of Mytilini, or Agiasos - on the internet.

Theophilos Chatzimichaeli (known as Theophilos) was a painter born around 1870 in Varia (close to Mytilini). He died in 1934.
Besides his artistic activity he worked as a doorman at the Greek Consulate in Izmir, as a sheperd in Pilion and in Volos he did all kinds of jobs. After spending some thirty years in foreign parts he returned to his home island where in the last five years of his life he painted walls, cafes and canvasses.

He was an eccentric man who was often teased by people. He loved history especially the great warrior heroes. At carnival times he regularly dressed in a traditional kilt, as Alexander the Great, one of his Macedonian soldiers, or a hero of the Greek war of independence (at the beginning of the nineteenth century).

He took all the work he could get and painted theatre designs for theatres, and, in exchange for a meal, would do a mural on the wall of a café. You can still see his work in Pillon and on Lesvos in some lost cafes. The most colourful part of his life was when he lived in a hollow tree at Karini, near Agiasos.

However, so much of his art perished, or was lost, what remains is worth a fortune and is well regarded by international art dealers. This month there is an exhibition of his work in the Benaki Museum in Kolonaki, Athens which has started people re-thinking Theophilos, the man, especially the long standing perception that his character was like his paintings – simple and naïve.

Already in his time there were postcards of the same subjects he painted in his ‘naïve’ style: people in traditional costume, rural scenes with shepherds, country girls or landscapes with villages which so often feature in his paintings. Art historian Maria Moschou, wrote an article for Athens Plus (October 1) in which she wonders whether he was so naïve. Maybe he simply knew that people liked to see heroes, street vendors or artisans.

I wonder what themes and subjects are popular these days? Besides beautifully photographed landscapes and city scenes there is a fashion for elderly Greek people with lined faces, long gone trades and crafts and, yes, people in traditional costumes which nobody wears any more. So if he been born a century later what would Theophilos have painted?

Would he have depicted cars travelling through the landscapes, or would he look for ones without signs of progress? Would he have painted scantily dressed tourists roaming the lanes of Molyvos and Petra, or would he has have depicted Albanian workers on building sites dusted with white cement, or maybe the old men sitting with their coffees all morning long in the cafenions? Would he have dared paint half naked women?

Stelios Kouniaris of Molyvos, a contemporary equivalent of Theophilos, is not worried by near nakedness or cars. His work is studded with such images, not big in the foreground, but like stray cats and dogs, they wander through his pictures.

Both the works of Theophilos and of Stelios Kouniaris present a colourful vision of Greek life - nice souvenirs to take home - but for the work of Theophilos you have to make do with postcards, unless you are a real art collector willing to spend a tidy sum on an original. Stelios Kouniaris has not yes been discovered by the art market and can still be bought for reasonable prices, although in the castle of Molyvos where he works, there are already some postcards of his work on display. Send me a postcard, now!
(for more information on Stelios Kouniaris, see: Epsilon art).

(With thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

The Greek – Chinese connection

2010-10-07T02:56:00.000-07:00

The port of Piraeus

Greek politicians are happy: China wants to help Greece out of its economic crisis with huge projects including a major investment in the port of Piraeus. What’s more, Chinese tourists have chosen Greece as their favourite European destination.

In May this year, Turkish and Greek tourist agencies worked together to attract Chinese tourists to this region with a plan for twenty-five offices in Istanbul and Athens all aimed at Chinese visitors.

Even though Lesvos has a few Chinese inhabitants, a Chinese tourist is still a curiosity. Chinese residents have shops selling cheap clothing and sometimes you see them driving around in over-loaded old cars, but I bet they total no more than the fingers on your hands.

On Rhodes there are several Chinese restaurants but the only one here, in Mytilini, closed its doors years ago. Chinese on Lesvos? You will only find them in their cheap stores in Kalloni and Mytilini.

This sudden friendship between China and Greece is not so strange. Both countries are said to be the cradle of civilizations: Greece of western civilization, China of the east. A Greek archaeologist, Theresa Mitsopoulou, thinks that the Greeks originally came from China. It is conventional wisdom that they are descend from Indo-European people, but she claims they are Sino-European in origin.

Theresa did her studies in the 1960s and discovered many similarities between ancient Greek and Chinese cultures: in their languages, techniques of shipbuilding, the use of the snake as a symbol, or an amulet against the evil eye. Her theories were too controversial in Greece. No proud Greek could ever admit his roots were in China. However people who agree with Theresa are convinced that there are archaeological finds in Greece that confirm her theory: in particular the use of the undulating snake with the heart shaped face; the ships once built and designed in Santorini especially for shallow waters clearly resemble Chinese ships; and in the language there are several similarities such as the Greek word for wood - dasos - and the Chinese dashu which means ‘tall trees’, and the clincher: the Greek word for grandmother is Yiayia and in Chinese it is Yeye.

Besides being an archaeologist Theresa used to be the bestknown tourist guide in Athens. She speaks six languages including, of course, Chinese. Had she not decided, after thirty years climbing the Acropolis, that she was now too old to get up to the Parthenon, to give up being a tour guide, she would have been be the ideal companion for the coming flood of Chinese visitors.

For Chinese tourists visiting Lesvos there is good news. This week on Lesvos the authorities assembled about the permission to install a custom post in the harbour of Molyvos, so that cruise ship passengers could be processed there instead of Mytilini. At present they have to endure a ninety minute bus ride before they can see the wonderful medieval village of Molybos on the opposite side of the island from Mytilini (although the journey does take them through the island’s gorgeous landscape). To land them directly at the port of Molyvos is a very attractive proposition all round. Lots of cruise ships already pass close by on their way to Istanbul, so it’s hoped by the 2012 season they can drop their passengers in Molyvos - and who knows how many Chinese we will then be meeting?

And although there are similarities between the Greek and Chinese language, Chinese remains impenetrable to people who haven’t studied it. So, it’s probably a smart move if our school children started learning it soon - and shopkeepers too. Before you know it the Chinese might even buy Molyvos harbour. So I say Hyanying! - my first Chinese word and I think it says Welcome!

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

Hear the wind sweeping through the mills

2010-10-01T00:16:00.000-07:00

(The wind turbines at Andissa)

One of the more powerful sounds you hear on the island is the wind in the trees, especially during storms. Sometimes you hear the winds arriving from far away and the noise made response by the trees varies a lot. Olive trees rustle with a high pitch, the fine needles of the pine forest make a much denser sound – like the booming of kettledrums – so when the winds blow you can enjoy very nice concerts.

In places where there are no trees but only hills and mountains to resist the wind, as in the desolate landscape of the West, some new instruments have recently joined the orchestra. This is the region where huge prehistoric sequoias once reached towards the sky, until thousands of years ago, when they were destroyed by volcanic eruptions. After a series of surveys and excavations some were revealed and displayed as the island’s famous Petrified Forest. But most of them are silent, buried in the earth, quiet witnesses to what once was an ear-splitting episode of natural music. Sequoias are the tallest trees in the world, up to more than a hundred metres! So imagine what play the wind must have made with them.

Nowadays the west of the island is an empty, undulating, hilly landscape, but it is still very appealing, because in the folds of the mountains you will find surprising green oases with woods and water falls, like at the mill of Krinelou, just above Eresos. And when you think of all the fossil trees still buried under your feet, you sense their connection with this otherwise mostly barren land.

However the emptiness is about to change. Driving from Andissa down towards Eresos and Sigri you will see the agents of that change: the wind turbines, huge modern windmills, installed on three hilltop ridges, a new forest of giants, which will eventually number over a hundred and fifty!

Wind turbines can be built even higher than the ancient sequoias– up to a 150 metres — but those around Andissa will be between about 50 and 80. Looking up from the foot of one these towers it’s difficult to judge its height. It is stabilised by huge pegs anchored deep in the ground, and during my visit the wind was blowing pretty strong and the blades were turning. Trees can be blown down by a gale and I felt a little anxious standing under that enormous colossus. Could it be blown down or lose a blade?

I counted about 25 towers altogether, each of which is said to generate two megawatts of electricity, and that, according to Wikipedia, would be enough for 2 000 American households. If you assume that a Greek household uses the same amount of energy, then the 25 wind turbines at Andissa could power 50 000 houses on the island. Lesvos has over the 90 000 inhabitants, so if you also assume there are two people in every household, these turbines could make enough for the whole island. The Rokas company has plans for 153 wind turbines altogether, which could supply 300 000 households. I do not know how much energy the factories and businesses use – and I don’t suppose sheep and goats consume much electricity – but it’s possible Lesvos could be self-sufficient from wind power, and even have enough left over to sell. I may have made miscalculated, and I don’t know a lot about this new green branch of energy generation, but standing under them, looking up at these impressive artificial trees frankly, I think wind turbine parks are a blight on the landscape!

The Netherlands is covered with them, so children in the future will probably take them for granted, but I don’t; although I don’t dislike them so much in the barren landscape of west Lesvos where they look as if they’ve always been, or like a monument to the long gone sequoias.

The sounds of west Lesvos will also change. The turbines have added a modern element to the symphony of winds: ‘vlaff-vlaff-vlaff’ go the blades, and sudden gust don’t break their steady rhythm. But how will it sound when the wind plays on all 153 mills? There will be some very modern new music generated by our very ancient landscape!

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki

Crisis time

2010-09-26T04:15:00.000-07:00

(The sea at Sigri)

Life goes on during the economic crisis. As in other places, businesses on Lesbos are closing down and I can’t be sure they will open again next year. I think it is easier to survive the crisis here than in a big city. Lots of businesses, like restaurants, are run by families from buildings they own, and most have a plot of land somewhere where they grow vegetables. But it is still a fact that even here people are poorer than they were.

There have been sceptical reactions to the ban on smoking in public places like bars and restaurants which came into force on September 1 for the third time. Of all Europeans Greeks smoke the most and they are not happy: first they take my money and then my cigarettes!

Greeks already have a big enough problem with the new tax system, which means everybody now has to pay up. Every business has to issue a receipt with every purchase — even petrol stations, where before the crisis they never heard of receipts.

Here in the north of the island reactions to the smoking ban are, as usual incredulous. Who will enforce it? In Molyvos you seldom see police, especially in winter when everybody eats (and smokes) indoors. And yet they have enough police to deal with a group hit hardest by the crisis: illegal workers, most of them from Albania.

Last week a special police team from Mytilini invaded some restaurants in Molyvos and if they found illegal workers, arrested the owners as well as the workers. Then they carted them off like cattle to prison in Mytilini. The workers will be thrown out of the country and, after a night in gaol, their employers will have to pay a hefty fine. For some it could be the end of their business. The Albanians will return home in to a country that strangely enough is less affected by the crisis than Greece.

When the communist regime in Albania – the poorest country of Europe – fell in 1991, large numbers left to look for work and a better life elsewhere, especially to Italy and Greece. When Italy closed its borders to them, Greece became their most popular destination and lots of them now live in here — some legal, others illegal. The ‘illegals’ are regularly expelled, but if they are sure of getting work, they find the paths that bring them back unseen over the mountains and are soon doing their jobs again.

Thanks to these people working abroad Albania has come out of a deep recession. As well as learning new skills in Greece they have done what workers in Greece used to do when they went away — sent back money home to keep their families alive. However, the money stream from Greece to Albania has been slowing down because more and more Albanians can now find work at home and the crisis in Greece has seen many of them returning. These are usually those who have lost jobs in Greece and are willing to try their luck in Albania. It remains to be seen whether they swell the numbers of unemployed or whether the arrival of skilled workers stimulates the economy.

For decades the economy in Greece profited from the cheap labour of these workers. Without foreign workers – as well as Albanians there are a lot of other east European nationalities here - there never would have been the Olympic Games in Athens and for the most part Greek agriculture depends on them; so it would not be good for Greece if they all left. It would bring on an even more serious crisis because Greeks have moved out of less skilled jobs and will not work for the poor wages they pay most Albanians.

So Greece is in a difficult position. At the same time the government is taking money out of Greek wallets and the economy is going into decline. Or could it be that this crisis will be the saviour that cleanses the economy from illegal work practices, from employees who do little work and people who pay no tax?? We will find the answer in the future.

On an island like Lesvos the crisis has less impact than in Athens. The fishermen still go out to the sea hoping for a big catch. The tourist season slowly comes to an end and some of the olive trees are so full of fruit you wonder who will harvest them in the coming winter.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

Food as cultural heritage

2010-09-15T07:13:00.000-07:00

The Petrified Forest of Lesvos did not make UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites. Greece has some twenty sites on that list, including the Acropolis in Athens, the medieval town of Rhodes, the Meteora Monastery, the monastery of Saint John the Theologian, its cave and historical centre (chora) in Patmos and the old city of Corfu. Even though the Petrified Forest was nominated, it was not elected.

So as far as UNESCO is concerned if you come to Lesvos now you will not find any world heritage. But this could change quite suddenly. Next time you may well enjoy some real world heritage: the Mediterranean diet.

This healthy diet might sound a little odd placed amongst all those ancient buildings but I have found out that besides its list of material objects, UNESCO now has items from the immaterial fabric of culture, known as the Intangible Cultural Heritage List.

Here you will find all kinds of dance, music and carnivals — the Argentinian tango and the Brazilian samba; the carnival of Binche (in Belgium), the Kunqu opera and Dragon festival from China, a traditional musical from Azerbaijan, and so on.

Together, the countries of Greece, Italy, Spain and Morocco have proposed the Mediterranean diet be included on this list, and although they were knocked back at first, the rules have been changed so that the diet could pass the test and join the list of music, festivals (and lace making) later this year in November.

So my dear tourists, when you come here to Lesvos, I will not hear from you eating a pizza or souvlaki every day. Instead, why not profit from your stay here by enjoying a very healthy diet? I hear through the grapevine that many tourists still have no idea how to eat Greek. They may know tsatsiki and souvlaki, but prefer to stay safe and order pizza or pasta.

We are lucky on Lesvos because we have no foreign restaurants like Chinese, Indian or fish & chips. If we did maybe the tourists might never try Greek food at all and feed only fish & chips and pizza.

So, perhaps you should at least listen to what UNESCO decrees and believe that traditional Greek food as served in nearly all restaurants here on the island is the same Mediterranean diet and discover that it is incredibly healthy. It is not only the olive oil but the variety of vegetables, fruit, grains and fish (with a little meat) that together have a positive influence on cardio–vascular diseases, cancer and diabetes. And food is also eaten according to what is fresh and in season. What could be more healthy?

A Greek salad with a bit of meat or fish is not quite enough. At a restaurant here, first you look at the appetizers, which in truth the Greeks don’t eat as ‘starters’ at all. They are all put on the table together and everybody shares them, and they include a variety of vegetables. You can order dishes based on zucchini, eggplant dish, beans and salad and potatoes as well as fish and meat. And don’t forget a cheese dish. You start eating whatever arrives first on the table and you will see that gradually the table will be spread with everything you have ordered. To know more about these dishes read: Greek Dining for Beginners and when you think you know how to eat Greek you can move on to Greek Dining for Experts.

I realise that most tourists who come here do not speak Greek. That should not be a problem because you are always welcome to go into the kitchen to have a look at what they have because most restaurants have their dishes on display (behind glass). This is definitely not just for tourists because Greeks like to go into the kitchen to see what food is on offer. And do not be afraid to order something you do not recognise. You may not be familiar with a lovely dish made from zucchini flowers stuffed with rice or cheese and you should also know that there is often a variety of different kinds of salted fish. Besides the sardelles pastes they might have salted tuna (lakerda pasto). And don’t be put by the prospect of an enormous serving, because salted or smoked fish are always served on tiny plates, to stimulate your appetite.

Beans with chickpeas is a particular delicacy on this island. Just taste it and you will love it. It’s the variety that defines the Mediterranean diet, so order at least three different kinds of vegetables, or you can stick to ‘starters’ only. When you come home after such a good meal, you feel not only satisfied but much healthier.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

Apples from Lesvos

2010-09-09T09:48:00.000-07:00

The big heat is over and immediately you feel the spicy breath of autumn. The trees are loaded with ripe figs and grapes and the sun hurries more quickly to disappear into the sea each day. So, once again it’s time for preserving fruit — why just leave them hanging there to rot?

Besides figs and grapes, ripe apples are rolling out, especially around Kalo Limni and Agiasos. The apples from Agiasos are known all over the island. They are small sour little crab-apples (Greeks love sour food), but worms love them too so you better use them up quickly: peel them, cut them into pieces, throw away the bad parts. I ask myself what the Greeks do with apples except serving them as fruit after a meal? You won’t find apple chutney in a Greek kitchen, nor an apple sauce.

On the internet I found a recipe for apple soup, milosoupa, not originally Greek so it probably came with immigrants, it is made with a vegetable bouillon, curry spices, lemon juice, an onion, oil, salt, pepper and of course apples. I also found pork chops with apple, but only the name sounds Greek: brizoles girines me krasi. You bake the pork chops in one pan, in another you fry apple slices. The meat is finished off with some white wine and then the baked apple slices are added. The dish is then sprinkled with cinnamon powder. There are other recipes: apples stuffed with walnuts, apples cooked in a sweet syrup and lots of different kinds of apple pie.

An apple does not necessarily remind you of Greece and yet it has a place in mythology. The famous Trojan war even did started with an apple. The goddess Eris - known for her sowing of discord and plots - was angry when she was not invited for the wedding of Peleus and the sea goddess Thetis, when other gods like Hera, Athena and Aphrodite were. So, like a furious fairy she threw an apple amongst the invited wedding guests saying that it was for the most beautiful woman present. To decide who was it fell to Paris, son of the Trojan king Priam and probably the most beautiful man there, to choose between Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. In true Greek style they each tried to bribe him — Hera with money and power, Athena with wisdom and Aphrodite with the promise he would be rewarded with the most beautiful woman on earth. Paris choose Aphrodite and so to make good her promise she had to give Paris the beautiful Helen, wife of the Spartan king Menelaos. When Paris took Helen to his home in Troy, Menelaos gathered his allies and launched the war to get Helen back.

Apples were also involved in one of the twelve ‘Labours of Herakles’. Because, when bewitched by a god he had murdered his wife and children, he had to work for Eurysteus, king of Mycene. The eleventh labour was to find and steal the golden apples from a tree in the garden of the Hesperides, the tree which Gaia had given to Hera and Zeus on their wedding day. Its golden apples had the power to give eternal life, and they were guarded by the Hesperides, the daughters of Atlas, together with an enormous snake, or dragon with a hundred heads. Herakles persuaded Atlas to go and get the apples but while he did so Herakles had to hold up the heavens. When he returned Atlas decided Herakles could continue with the job and he would go and give the apples to King Eurysteus. Herakles agreed but tricked Atlas into taking back the burden of the sky and then ran away with the apples and gave them to Pallas Athena, who returned them to the Hesperides.

In ancient times if you threw an apple to someone, it was a marriage proposal and if they caught it they accepted the offer. Let’s hope no true lover ever dropped one, because there would have been no marriage.

So apples are indeed part of Greek culture. They grow in orchards or in the wild on the slopes of the mountains here. I will not pretend that Lesvos is a paradise full of apples, but it is a paradise of fruit. Even the word paradise comes from fruit. In 401 BC the Greek historian Xenophone was so impressed by the walled fruit gardens of Persia, when he got home he made one himself — thus introducing the Persian word for walled garden, pairidaeza into Greek. In Latin it became paradysus and much later in English paradise. Lesvos is not exactly walled in, but the surrounding salty sea act like a natural protector for this amazing paradise of fruit.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

In the moonlight

2010-09-02T07:47:00.000-07:00

(Full moon over the bay of Molyvos)

If you live in a city, you might not realize it, but when the full moon shines in place without much less artificial light you can have dinner in the moonlight and you can walk without a torch and see where you are goling. I keep on being amazed by the brightness of the full moon and each time it appears I enjoy the blue-white light that shines on the mountains, mirrors itself in the sea and lights up white buildings, like a film set.

When you are in a magical place, like on the Acropolis in Athens, or on an archaeological site like the Temple of Messa (close to Agia Paraskevi), where the marble remains of an Ionic temple from the Aeolian era catches the moon’s rays, time seems to stop.

It is a new tradition in Greece to keep about ninety archaeological sites open for the night of the full moon in August, so visitors can enjoy the play of the moonlight on centuries old columns, stones, buildings and mosaics.

At Thermi (close to Mytilini) the evening was dedicated to Sappho and amongst others her poem about the moon was recited. Our eyes were delighted by moonlight and our ears with music and verse. I can imagine how in ancient times, when there was no artificial light on earth, the days of the full moon were even more dramatic and so Sappho could not help but write about this heavenly, silver disc.

Each culture has its own myths about the moon, or gods representing it. In Greece it was the goddess Selene (later Artemis) the sister of Helios, god of the sun, and of Eos, goddess of the dawn. Selene was a discreet goddess who features in only a handful of stories. The most popular one is how she fell desperately in love with Endymion, a shepherd or hunter (according to Pausianas he was even a king). He was so beautiful that Selene asked Zeus to give him eternal life. This way Endymion would sleep forever, without getting older and Selene could keep on enjoying his beauty. Each time the moon disappears behind the mountains Selene visits her sleeping beauty. The ancient Greeks believed that he slept in a cave on the southern slope of Mt. Latmus, a mountain at the southwest coast of modern Turkey, where there are the remains of a temple dedicated to Selene. Endymion had to be kissed to be woken, or maybe it was electric light — because there is no sign of him now.

Or maybe he woke up because Selene was unfaithful. It is said that after she slept with Zeus the Nemean lion was born. For the first of his labours as ordered by the King of Tiryns, Herakles had to kill it. There is also a rumour that Selene had an affair with Pan. Nevertheless, she supposedly gave birth to fifty offspring all sired by Endymion and each of these moon goddesses represented a phase of the moon.

With so many phases you need a machine to calculate when the full moon would appear or when an eclipse might occur. In 1901 in a sunken ship wrecked close to the island of Anti-Kythera an ancient astronomical instrument was found that for a century kept scientists busy trying to find out how it worked. It now is thought that this Antikythera Mechanism dates from 150–100 BC and is now thought to be an analogue or Moon computer.

After extended studies scientists now think that this machine is more than a planetarium. Two years ago they published a new report that says it is an analogue calculator constructed to identify phases of both moon and sun (including eclipses) and many other astronomical events.

For instance, in ancient times the Olympic games took place every four years starting at the second full moon after the summer solstice. So it would be handy to know when that was going to be and this (and many other events) is what this machine was used to predict — including marriages which Greeks liked to celebrate at full moon, especially in the month of January.

Last Tuesday (August 24) was a full moon night and even after it had started to wane for two days its light was still very bright. On Thursday night boats taking part in the Aegean Regatta slowly sailed through its silver beam, silently gliding into Molyvos harbour. For some days the meltemi had already stopped blowing so now the yachts needed every whisper of wind to get them over the finish line. On Saturday, for a local race, the blue sea between Molyvos and Petra was filled with the white of their sails catching the wind and that night festivities climaxed with music, dance and fireworks.

The moon has finished partying and shrinks a little more each day, but just as its light fades the stars twinkle more brightly. But every time the full moon shines its light on the earth, there is nothing to be done but to get poetic by moonlight.

Karagiozis the weatherman

2010-08-25T00:33:00.000-07:00

(Picture from internet)

Some weeks ago a disappointment came for Greeks about their traditional shadow puppet theatre. Unesco decided that its main character originated in Turkey. So Karagiozis came from Turkey, but the puppet theatre generated around this mischievous character is very much part of Greek culture.

The puppet theatre tradition has roots in Indonesia and China and may have come to Turkey with gypsies from India, with travellers from China, or maybe it even came from Egypt. However, it was definitely popular in Turkey around the sixteenth century.

In the nineteenth century when Greece was still occupied by the Ottoman Turks, Karagiozis arrived here. He is a poor man who lives with his wife Aglaia and three sons in a little shack, always on the left hand side of the stage, and to the right is always the rich palace of the Pasha. The Pasha is the local ruler representing the Turkish Sultan.

Karagiozis is an anti-hero. He is always looking for money to survive. His stories always follow strict rules: the introduction where he talks to his sons and goes into his house; then somebody usually Karagiozis’ friend Hadzjivatis, explains that the Pasha has a problem and he keeps on about it until Karagiozis shows up. Karagiozis sees it as an opportunity to make money and offers his help, either with or without the help of Hadzjivatis. Other characters pass by: Barba Yorgos, a man from the mountains dressed in traditional style, Stavrakas a petty thief from Pireaus, Sior Dyonisios an Italian Greek from the island of Zakynthos, Morfonios a European who always falls in love, and Solomon a rich Jew. The Pasha who administers the law on behalf of the Sultan decides punishments and sometimes rewards; his beautiful daughter is called Fatme and the man that carries out Pasha’s orders is his Albanian guard Veligekas.

These stories are about the ‘heroic’ deeds of Karagiozis, mostly based on historical facts from Greek life during Ottoman rule, or are comedies in which Karagiozis is ridiculed. The performances are often accompanied by a singer and a group of musicians.

A lot of puppeteers have their own traditional scripts, handed down by older practitioners. Because of television the puppet theatre has lost some of this popularity but you can still find frequent performances all over the country. In the summer from Wednesday to Sunday at nine o’clock in the evening a puppet theatre performs in the square in front of the Youth Society building in Molyvos.

I can imagine that this week we will get a show as follows:

Karagiozis dries the faces of his sons with a big dirty handkerchief:
“Go to the sea, go to the sea, the only place you can cool off” he says.
They answer together: “But we cannot swim!”.
“Find the fishes and see how they swim, you layabouts”, he replies, “you should always watch how others do things.”
Behind his back the children make faces and go into the little house, and Karagiozis follows, giving his own face an extra long wipe with the handkerchief before he shuts the door.

At the other side of the stage, at the palace of the Pasha, a door opens. Karagiozis’ friend Hadzjivatis appears, pushed only to be outside by Pasha who shouts:
“Find somebody that can end this heat wave. Every time she goes outside it makes my daughter faints.” He gives Hadzjivatis an encouraging kick away from the palace and closes the door.

Hadzjivatis looks around: nobody. He starts to sing a song about the beautiful Greek summer. Still nobody shows up. Then he starts calling for a weatherman. Karagiozis comes out and slaps his friend on the shoulder. Hadzjivatis complains: “This very long heat wave must be stopped but how?”

Karagiozis takes his friend to sit outside his house, and with their heads in their hands they think over the challenge. Then Sior Dyniosios approaches, holding an umbrella. Karagiozis goes to him and asks:
“Can you not procure a cooling wind?” Dyonisios answers:
“I only know the sirocco, a very warm wind from the Sahara”.
“Are you crazy!”, shouts Karagiozis, “temperatures are high enough here on Lesvos. Go back to your Ionian islands, go on, go!” and he pushes poor Dyonisios away.

While Dyonisios slowly exits, from the other side a strolling Barba Yorgos comes near. He is whistling, which irritates Karagiozis.
“How can you whistle in this terrible heat. Have you lost a sheep?”
Barba Yorgos stops whistling and looks at Karagiozis:
“Don’t you feel it? Do you not see that the meltemi is coming?”
Karagiozis scatches his ear:
“The meltemi, the meltemi?”
Barba Yorgos helps him:
“Yeah, you know, that wind from the north that will end the heat wave.”
Karagiozis immediately starts jumping up and down with excitement: “Are you sure, are you sure?!”
As if there are signs that the wind can be seen Barba Yorgos points up into the sky. Karagiozis also looks up and seems to hear something faraway. “I hear a goat, your goat is lost. Go and get him. Go back to the mountains, you!” He pushes Barba Yorgos, who starts whistling again and then quietly disappears.
Karagiozis goes to Hadzjivatis and shouts to him:
“You have done enough thinking at my house. Go home, go on, go. I will take care of the heat problem.”

When Karagiozis is alone, he wipes his face and adjusts his hair then goes to the palace and knocks on the door. It opens and Karagiozis makes a deep bow of reverence.
“My good Pasha, I hear that your daughter cannot bear this heat. That is why I have asked my gods to send a cooling wind.” As Karagiozis bows again, the first blast of wind makes the palm tree next to the palace bend. During a second blow, the tree bends over even lower. Then a third wind gust arrives and this time it’s so strong Karagiozis has to hold on to the Pasha’s door and the tree crashes down on to palace, followed by sounds of breaking glass and the screaming of Fatme.

Karagiozis panics and wants to run away, but Veligekas the guard runs out to catch him. A very angry Pasha also storms out:
“Did you order this wind?! Did you scare my daughter to death and make the palm tree fall over?! You will get ten strokes of the cane! And I warn you, if this wind continues, I will have you cut into pieces!”.

So, once more Karagiozis fails to gain a reward.

And now the real meltemi is blowing over Lesvos. It has chased the prolonged heat wave away — and blown over chairs, tables and many other things. The blue sea is furious with white laced foam and no boat has dared to go out of the harbour. It is said that it will last for a week and we hope that it decreases its force in time for the Aegean Regatta which ends next week on Lesvos.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki