Going away

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

(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

(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

(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

(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

(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

(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