Waterfall for sale

(The river at the Krinelou Mill)

Not only is Greece in crisis, the European Union itself sinks deeper and deeper into a financial swamp. Everything and everybody gets accused, the people have to pay and only the bankers — one of the main causes of the problem — continue to reward themselves with huge bonuses as if nothing had happened. And no authority dare forbid them.

So there you are with your savings. Not wanting to put them in the bank because they are even too selfish to give you a reasonable interest rate. Put it under your bed? Then you risk the mice eating it. Take it to the stock market? You might as well go to the casino.

So maybe you best invest it in some real estate and make a dream come true? Even if you don’t make big money, it’s always nice to be able to dream about spending big!

Imagine that you could buy an old watermill, complete with a lake and a real waterfall... For 350.000 euro you can get one here on Lesvos — the Krinelou waterfall (plot Eresos). Flowing out of the waterfall there’s a little river which although it might never really be your property, each day you can enjoy watching the endless stream of water. It is on an enchanting piece of land, where old plane trees contemplate themselves in the water, even in the midst of summer. There are paths with wooden rails which crawl over volcanic rocks towards the big waterfall, where you could take a shower every day. It is even said that many centuries ago the Lesvorian poetess Sappho used to come here for a bath.

I was stunned when I heard that the mill and its gorgeous land was for sale. The owner Panagiotis Kinelou must have more financial problems than his country. It was his dream to renovate his grandfather’s old watermill and with love he started to rebuild it. He made wooden floors above the water where you can quietly dream away. He cut chairs and tables from big chunks of wood, he dug small canals to irrigate his orchard, so to put this all for sale must hurt a lot.

I do hope he finds people to buy it who will love the place as he did. His last dream was to make it a tourist attraction, it is, after all only a few kilometres away from the famous Petrified Forest. Although the way to the site is pretty rough, not suitable for mass visits by coach parties, it has potential for small scale tourism.

Do you dream about opening up a tourist centre on a Greek island? Well, the Karuni Estate is for sale (Buildings on an amazing plot). This also a place with which you could easily fall in love. The estate is on a hill, a little outside Molyvos with four buildings, two with large spaces and studios, (the other two are bungalows) set in a beautiful park with rare trees and flowers all around. The greenery feels like magic and everywhere you are greeted by stunning views including Molyvos and its magnificent castle.

If such an estate is too big for you, for half a million euro more you can become the owner of a breathtaking, beautiful renovated, traditional Lesvorian Tower House, not far from Mytilini (Villa Aklidiou). This is a real dream house complete with antique furniture, a Byzantine bath, as well as a swimming pool and fancy lights everywhere. If you think this is too much, you can always turn an old olive mill in Eresos into spacious living quarters.

But maybe you do not want too many tourists around so even the Tower House would be too much. Well, you can always buy your very own island where you can be alone, play Robinson Crusoe or build yourself a modern villa. For a million and a half euro you can call yourself King of your own island (St. Athanasios Island).

It is great to be able to dream away about owning a waterfall, an estate, an historic house or an island. But not everybody is rich enough to afford such things. Do not worry. On Lesvos small dreams can come true. Especially in the unknown villages where there are plenty of houses for sale for much less money. For 150.000 euro you can buy yourself a small Palace (Palataki) in the village of Lisvori. For 200.000 you can buy a bungalow (which includes an old restaurant next door which you can resurrect). Its speciality is that it has a pool. Or for only 40.000 euro you can get a charming little cottage in the village of Vrisa, close to Vatera (on the south coast of the island).

Surf the internet and you will be surprised how many houses and plots of land are for sale on the island. You might even get the impression that everything is for sale. But do not take every seller seriously. In the tourist areas they ask such high prices it’s pretty obvious they don’t really have to sell. Of course, they would be pleased if a fool came along and bought at the inflated price, but otherwise, despite the crisis, they will continue living as before, because life under the sun just goes on like it always did…

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

Ash clouds and strikes

(The market of Dikili)

Travelling used to be an adventure: when you wanted to go to Greece, you journeyed by train through Yougoslavia to Athens, or through Italy where you took the ferry boat to Greece. In the sixties and seventies only a few tourists went by plane. But the years are long gone when island hopping by boat was so popular.
When you come to Schiphol, the airport of Amsterdam, you will see charter flights to the Greek islands are too many to count on two hands. Most tourists do not know much more about the route they take than that a plane brings them directly to the spot where they want to spend their holiday.

So when something goes wrong, it is hell. The volcano on Iceland was proof of how dependent we now are on airplanes. When they cannot fly not only does the tourist business lose enormous sums of money, but the general economy too. We even forget to use our imagination, as proved by the Dutch fashion designer who panicked because when the ash clouds appeared over Europe and he couldn’t get his collection out of Milano by plane he forgot that the North of Italy is quite easily reached by car or train. The same for a Dutch journalist working in Istanbul who claimed he was ‘stuck’ in Holland. Had he never heard about the Orient Express? Even though the famous luxury train that used to go all the way from Paris to Istanbul no longer exists as such trains still pass overland to Turkey.

I got stuck too, in my own house here in Greece. I had to go to Amsterdam to attend to some business but the sky was dark with the cloud of ash from Iceland’s volcano. I was glad that the business could wait, otherwise I would have taken the car and boat route, still a way of getting off the island and quite normal for people who don’t like flying. It took a week for the planes to resume flights to Amsterdam so I could get to my business.

Coming back was not so easy either. The days I wanted to travel were the same that lots of Dutch people decided to take a spring holiday and all flights to Lesvos and Athens were booked out. A few days later I found an inexpensive flight by charter which reckoned would get me home in three and a half hours.

It didn’t quite happen that way, not because the volcano’s clouds obscured the route. No, it was angry Greeks that interfered with my homecoming. Although the government is doing everything it can to save the country, the population itself prefers to believe it’s a conspiracy by America and certain parts of Europe to take over Greece. So they are on strike.
When on Tuesday morning I arrived at the airport very very early I was not happy at all to be told that our flight to Mytilini would not happen because of a strike by air traffic controllers, so instead we would be flown to Izmir in Turkey. We landed at a spacious and beautiful airport where our travel agent directed us to buses, that would bring us to Dikili, a small port town opposite Lesvos.

It was quite startling to be driven over the highways around Izmir, the third largest Turkish city, which used to be known as Smyrna, and where so many Greeks used to live. These days the surrounding hills are stacked with huge apartment blocks, a typical phenomenon of modern Turkey. Only after Izmir does the landscape become more ‘natural’, so I could see the country described by the great Turkish writer Yasar Kemal (Memed, my Hawk, Anatolian tales). The closer we got to Dikili the greener the hills, mountains and plains became.

There we had several hours to spend at the local market and to taste a little Turkish life. Then two whole plane loads of people going to Lesvos were crammed on to a small ferry chartered to take us across to Mytilini. The sea was smooth, taking on the colours of the sunset, there were dolphins wishing us a good journey and we reached our destination as evening fell.
If I would have known the kind of journey that awaited me I would have taken more lightweight clothes and probably wouldn’t have been so tired, because it was in fact a beautiful trip. I already knew that smart Greeks (especially from Thessalokini), travel by car trough Turkey in order to take the ferry from Ayvalik or Dikili. It’s a far less expensive way to go than by the big Greek ferries from Piraeus or Thessaloniki. And plane tickets from Holland to Izmir are also far less expensive than to Lesvos. You just have to organize your travel from Izmir to Dikili or Ayvalik — but be sure you pick a day the ferry is running (in winter they are less regular than in summer).

Real travel takes time, but when you are prepared, even the beginning of the journey is part of the vacation. I was a bit worn out but I really enjoyed this unexpected diversion along the coast of Turkey. So I recommend it as a more adventurous mode of travel; so when a volcano decides to spew up its guts it may not be such a disaster. If I were a businesswoman I would certainly think of resurrecting the Orient Express. Believe me, in these uncertain times ‘old fashioned’ travel by train, bus or boat is going to be big business, mark my words.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

About plants that can destroy armies

(rhododendron luteum)

In spring Lesvos is just one big public garden full of wild flowers, but I already said that once. Last week I wrote that the flower of flowers is the orchid, but the nicest spring-attraction here on the island — and each year I have to mention them — is the rivers of yellow rhododendrons that flow though the dark pine woods on the slopes of the mountains between Parakila, Anemotia and Vatoussa.

These flowers are not only beautiful to look at, but they smell like divine nectar. When you walk through the woods in the West their heavy, sweet scent is so heavy in the fresh pine forest air that you could easily become intoxicated. As long as you only devour them with your nose you’ll be all right, but don’t ever try to taste their honey.

Around 400 BC the two sons of Darius II of Babylon, Artaxerxes and Cyrus, got in a fight over who should inherit their father’s power after his death. Artaxerxes won and banished Cyrus to a remote part of Greece. There Cyrus gathered an army together and went back to Babylon to try and take power from his brother. He did not succeed, he was killed and his army defeated. Xenophon, a kind of war correspondent-historian who traveled with Cyrus, put the army back together and traveled back to where they came from. On the way they had to fight other enemies and in the country of Colchis they were attacked. They managed to break through a small division of soldiers and continued their way towards Trebizond in the district of Pontus. When they felt safe they stopped to rest and gather food. They found honey and ate plenty of it. That same night all soldiers — about ten thousand in all were left — became ill and behaved like they were drugged. It was lucky the Army of Colchis did not find them then, otherwise they all would have easily been killed. Centuries later scientists guessed that they probably ate from the yellow rhododendron luteum, also known as rhododendron Pontica because it’s in the Pontus area where they grow in profusion.

Honey can be dangerous if you buy it from a beekeeper that does not know the plants — there are many poisonous species which vary from slightly dangerous to very toxic. One of the best known, and very poisonous in Greek history is hemlock. It is famous thanks to the death of one of the greatest philosophers. In 399 BC Socrates was accused of neglecting the Gods who were ruling in his time and for speaking about ‘new gods’. He was judged to be a bad influence on youngsters and was given the choice of exile for life from Greece or death by drinking a cup of poison. Socrates chose the latter path and it is said that the poison he drank came from the plant we call hemlock.

Hemlock (Conium maculatum) looks a little like chervil and can grow up to two meters high. It is an inconspicuous plant in the Greek landscape. Its juice however contains nerve gas that in a small quantity can be fatal. So you better stay away from conium maculatum, or hemlock.

But tell that to the birds! They have no problem eating hemlock seeds and seem to like them without suffering any ill effects. However, there is a problem if the birds that eat hemlock seeds are themselves eaten — by humans. On Chios some people who ate partridges shot during a hunting expedition fell ill and after an investigation it was found that, yes, it was the seeds of the hemlock that caused their illness.

Whenever a volcano erupts and spews huge clouds of ash, stone and glass in the air that endanger airplanes, it is understandable that they have to be they grounded. So maybe you might think it might be forbidden to hunt birds on Chios in case they are toxic — so in that case, better to leave them in the air than bring them to ground, or the dinner table? But no, the people of Chios want the impossible. Like trying to catch the dangerous volcanic clouds up in the sky, they now want to destroy all the hemlock on their island.

Everybody who has been to Chios or any other Greek island knows that it would be an impossible task. Who would go and eradicate the plants on the islands and regions that are uninhabited? Would not the birds that fly there bring back hemlock seeds? And who could guarantee that no birds from Lesvos ever made a little trip to Chios, having consumed a swathe of hemlock seeds? Should the airspaces between the two islands be closed to bird traffic, or wouldn’t it be simpler to just but a ban on hunting them?

We must hope that no beekeeper falls in love with the magnificent yellow rhododendrons and puts his beehives close to their wonderful flowers to get that marvelous aroma in his honey. If that happened the people of Lesvos might then have to go off into the volcanic regions of the island—where the abundant crops of wild rhododendrons can be found— to pull up or destroy the flowers with weedicide. That would be a great loss of one of the most beautiful attractions of Lesvos in the spring.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

Jumping rope with Fox Testicles Ice cream

(An Ophrys)

Every spring I am flabbergasted by the profusion of wild flowers that grow here on the island. It starts with the very colourful anemones, which sometimes come on as early as December. Then follow poppies, shaggy cistus, daffodils and soon all the fields, hills and mountain slopes are full of all kind of flowers. Tourists who come here only in summer will never have any idea what the dry earth they see brought forth before they arrived!.

The flower of flowers has to be the wild orchid, known to many specialists and collectors all over the world. It is not only the fragile beauty that makes the orchid into a collectors item for many people, it is also the fact that the flower is able to change itself, a quality that is unique in the modern world of plants.

For example, the fertilization biology of the Ophrys, the Bee-Orchid, is fascinating. Many kinds have developed a scent, a structure and colour pattern that mimics the female bee, wasp or beetle and this is how they attract the males of those same insects. The flower gets fertilized when the male tries to copulate with the flower...

On Lesvos there are about 60 to 100 different kinds of wild orchid, (opinions vary), and when you look at all the varieties you can understand just how a bee might make a mistake — because the differences are very hard to see. It is quite easy for a bee to accidentally visit an Ophrys that does not look at all like the right kind of female bee, but if the natural order of things proceed as they should, from this cross-fertilization a new variety or sub species is born.

Orchids don’t only drive bees crazy, but butterflies and their collectors too, as well as a group of people which believes an orchid is an aphrodisiac. The sexual implication is right there in the name because in Greek: orchis means testicle, and if you dig up an orchid you will find that it sprouts of two tiny bulbs (or tubers) which suspended from the stalk like a pair of balls.

It was Theophrastus (371–287 BC), the famous scientist from Lesvos, and often called the first botanist, that gave this eccentric flower the name of orchis. Some hundreds of years later a famous Greek doctor Pedanios Dioskoridis (40-90 n.Chr) wrote in his ‘De materia medica’ that Theophrastus was right to say the orchid could stimulate the sexual appetite of a man.

To that end the most important product of the orchid is called salep which comes from the Arab word for fox testicles, in Greek salepi. You dig up the bulbs, dry them in the sun until they are hard and then grate or rub them, until they turn into a fine flour. One of the secrets of the French chocolate maker and Royal warrant holder Sulpice Debauve, who had several famous chocolate shops in Paris around the beginning of the 19th century, was that he used salep in his chocolate.

Salep is also the name of a once famous drink which is made by heating milk and sugar with it until it becomes creamy and is served with a sprinkle of cinnamon. In the 17th and 18th century, before the hype for coffee and tea spread through Europe, the drink was really popular, especially in the Middle East and Turkey, and even England. For a long time in Greece and Turkey it was sold on the streets and in kafenions. People who could not afford coffee, would drink salep before starting work because it had a similar stimulating effect.

Nowadays it is said that maybe you can still find some street vendors with salep in the streets of Athens, but in general it has disappeared from Greek life, mainly because wild orchids are protected flowers in Europe, and making salep is prohibited. However, in Turkey its consumption continues as before, especially during winter, but also in summer Turks like to take dondurma with it, a kind of ice cream made with cream, milk, sugar and mastic mixed with salep until it becomes a gummy kind of mass. It is so thick and gooey it has to be eaten with a knife and fork and so elastic that you can tear it into long ropes you could use for skipping!

However the popularity of dondurma ice cream is a headache for nature conservationists. To make 1 kilo of salep you need at least a thousand orchid tubers! So can you imagine how many were needed in the days when Turkey exported hundreds tons of salep. Nowadays the trade is forbidden, but even though shepherds and other collectors warn that it’s getting ever harder to find the orchids, the Turks are still avid consumers of their dondurma, and are unlikely to give it up. However, it’s a real possibility that wild orchids will completely disappear from the Turkish landscape.

The major quality of salep is that it makes milk or water thicker. Probably, the salep sold nowadays contains only a small amount of orchid flour mixed in with cornstarch and vanilla. The orchid bulb has such a fragrant taste that it does not matter too much if you amplify it with cornstarch.

Dondurma ice cream does still exist in Greece — called Kaimaki Ice. To make it (and spare the orchids) here’s a recipe for Phoney Fox Testicle Ice Cream: using cornstarch, vanilla powder and some rose or orange-blossom water (and you need an ice cream machine).

3 cups of cream
3 cups of whole milk
1,25 cup of sugar
3 tbs. Cornstarch
1 tsp. rose or orange-blossom water
1 tsp. Vanilla powder
1/2 tsp. Mastic powder

Mix the cornstarch with some milk. Heat the other milk with the sugar and then add the mixed cornstarch and the other ingredients. Stir everything while it cooks until it becomes like a cream. Let the substance cool off and make ice with it in the ice cream machine.

(with thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

Iron and concrete

(The new parking place at Molyvos)

Most of the time Easter means the beginning of the summer season here on the island. This year however, Greek Easter - the same date this year as the Catholic and Anglican Easter - is so early that it will really won’t be the beginning of summer. Normally most hotels try to be open by Easter: they do the gardens, refresh the rooms and tourists are all welcome. But this year only a few hotels are ready to open for Easter. Not many Greek visitors are coming because of the financial crisis. The municipalities try hard to get their roads and amenities ready for Easter, but for them this year it’s also too early.

I have to report that the municipality of Molyvos has not been lucky in this respect, especially with the road to Eftalou which suffered so much storm damage during winter. Sometimes you will see a bulldozer or truck shuffling rocks on to the road, but that hasn’t helped much. Last week our notorious west wind started blowing again so it looks like the municipality has one of the 12 labours of Herakles to perform, because waves have again pounded the boulevard and, will, I am sure, have undone some of the repair work.

The municipality seems to be a bit luckier with their work on a new parking lot, although that won’t be ready before Easter either. The town of Molyvos is a protected area and at the foot of its hill, just behind the school there used to be a beautiful parking space, a kind of field with olive trees where everybody could park their car. I thought it functioned very well but the municipality had different ideas, so the whole area is to be covered with concrete, and they are even building a huge wall in order to make a higher field as well as a parking space. Until now they have kept the olive trees, but you have to ask yourself why are they spending so much money on a parking place in such a time of crisis?

The municipality of Lisvori has no money left to realize all their projects. And so the refurbishing of the Hot Springs has also come to a halt. The mayor however has kept to his word about parking facilities so now the huge concrete apron in front of the two hot springs is covered with tiles. But the hotel and the baths have been left as they were: the improvements to the baths are not finished because the Archeological Service stopped the work because it did not have the permits.

The municipality of Petra is also taking part in the competition to see which town can make the island uglier. The new priest of the famous Maria Glikofilousa church on the rock that towers above the little seaside village has decided to make it easier for the many pilgrims that come every year to climb its 114 steps: along the path that winds over the rocks to the church he has placed a huge and ugly fence. Maybe you might think: everybody his own taste. But Petra’s beautiful eye catching Byzantine relic hardly deserves to have the kind of fence you normally see around a building site. Come Easter the thousands of cameras that will be pointed at the rock and its church will not be capturing images of family members proudly climbing all the stairs; all that will be seen will be the fences!

But at least the priest of the Maria Glikofilousa Church will be ready to receive churchgoers on the Saturday to Sunday night when most Greeks will attend the Easter midnight mass. But the parking lot at Molyvos and the coastal road in Eftalou will not be ready and will probably be the causes of some entertaining chaos.

Every year we wonder if everything will be ready for the summer season by the middle of April. And every year again we are surprised that many Greeks succeed in fulfilling their version of those labours of Herakles. However, this year, I am sure the above named projects will not be ready.

A plate of delicious poisonous chorta

(picture: svirnies)

Spring has arrived on the island together with oceans of flowers. The Greeks have put their chairs and tables outside: summer can start.

But the Greeks love to live outside in winter too. Whenever the temperature allows it, a Greek always prefers to sip his coffee or drink his ouzo outside. On a nice sunny Sunday Greeks do not all take off into nature, like in Holland. Most people only go into the wild to find something they can take. Like in autumn, men go mushroom hunting in the woods. In the winter and spring it is mostly women that go into the fields to gather wild greens and vegetables (chorta).

Chorta time starts in January but only in March do the very delicious shoots of the otherwise prickly wild asparagus bush appear — yes, wild asparagus! Sometimes they appear far away from the bush itself, so when you are staring at the main plant hoping to see shoots, one may be right in front of your nose swaying gently in the breeze.

Looking for asparagus is as much fun as gathering mushrooms, but you really have to look hard to find the new shoots. The first year that we went gathering them, as well asasparagus shoots as thin as knitting needles, we found some nearly as thick as your finger. We proudly showed them to a neighbour who called out: “Those are not ‘sparangia’, but ‘svirnies’!”. Pff!—another new word for our Greek vocabulary (and another kind of asparagus).

This year we discovered that these same svirnies—called avronies on Crete and in Turkey stifno—were the young shoots of the tamus communis, a climber with heart shaped leaves. But I really got a fright when I read that they are poisonous! A few weeks ago a friend of us gathered a big bunch of them and together with more friends we enjoyed eating them as a salad. Well, we all survived. As I did when I gathered a few more myself last week, with no damage done to my health. I read on the internet that we had probably eaten the tamus cretica, maybe it’s an edible kind? On another website a scientist annnounced that there is no such plant as tamus cretica, only dioscorea communis, which is also poisonous. How confusing!

I best leave it to the botanists to give the plants these funny names. The fact is, though, in Greece we eat not only asparagus but as well their lookalikes: svirnies or avronies.

It is better to get to know what plants look like, rather than remembering their various different names, as these may vary from region to region. Like I finally found what plant the Greeks call kardamo. I had always thought it was the wild version of the famous spice used in the Indian kitchen: cardamom.

The Greeks use that same cardamom in some of their dishes, but it does not grow in Greece. It is known from linear B tablets that it was traded by the ancient as ‘cardomomom’ (as it was known then), an expensive spicy seed that could make you rich.

But when Greek women gathering chorta come home with kardamo, it’s not the spicy heavily scented seed, but a green plant whose leaves can be eaten. It would be great to start trading in kardamo because (like cardamom seeds) they do have a pretty special and delicious taste: strong and spicey, a very nice addition to your salad.

The plant looks and tastes a bit like field cress, which has the Latin name kardamine. That may explain why the Greeks call it kardamo. The problem is that it looks alike but not exactly. Maybe it’s a new cress species: Lesvorian cress or cardamine lesvorine?

Well, I certainly do not want to start a discussion among botanists who can argue for years about new species and their names. Kardamo is just a nice spicey green herb that makes a Greek salad more tasty. It grows like sparangia and svirnies (or avronies) at the beginning of spring. I’ve no idea what kardamo is but it must be a very health-giving plant, otherwise the Greeks wouldn’t eat it. The same is true for the svirnies. And we all know how healthy asparagus is: full of vitamin C and antioxidants. Bon appetit!

A letter to the mayor of Molyvos

photo:GrisGris (cat to the right), in memoriam

Eftalou, 14 March 2010

To Mister Karadonis, the Mayor of Molyvos

We have known Eftalou well now for seven years and have always known Adonis and his many dogs. However, since Adonis is now ill and does not live here anymore, there is nobody to look after and control them — and there are about fifteen. We have noticed that since last summer the dogs have become more and more aggressive and they no longer stay close to the ‘house’ where Adonis lived (in the shed across the road and on the beach opposite the Hotel Panselinos. They now roam into the fields (where vegetables are growing), into the gardens of the Hotel, and as far as the meadows across from the Pizzeria. They are a major nuisance.

On Saturday morning I was woken up at 7.30 by several of these dogs barking and running around our house. When I opened my bedroom window, I saw several of them attacking one of my cats. I ran downstairs to chase them away but I was too late to save the cat, she died in my arms. So now Adonis’ dogs are murdering my cats. I can assure you that it was a really shocking sight to see one of them killed in this way.

On Saturday night several dogs came again to the house, twice, and on Sunday morning at 5 am I rushed out of my bed to chase them away again and then had to do the same thing at 8.00 am!!!!!

A friend once saw these dogs kill a little dog on the street and another time she witnessed them killing a cat, also on the street (the small dogs and cats seem to have disappeared from Adonis’ place).

Even if I were the only person who was being bothered by this pack of dogs (but I am not) you will immediately understand that this is a situation that cannot be allowed to continue.

Last summer several tourists were afraid to walk along the road past Adonis’ place and there are people who are even afraid to pass there by bike or motorbike. One incident last summer involved a female tourist who wanted to get from Eftalou back to Molyvos, but she was so afraid of the dogs that she had to go back to hotel Bella Vista in order to phone for a taxi to pick her up and take her past the dogs!

And it is not only tourists who are afraid. Because of the dogs a lot of Molyvos people will not walk to Eftalou any more. I understand that Adonis wants to keep his dogs and it will break his heart when they are gone. But I think that he and his family will have to take the responsibility of keeping them in an orderly manner. It cannot be allowed that Adonis’ dogs are able to terrorize a main thoroughfare of your community, but that is what is happening now. (TB: Who will bear the responsibility if a person suffers serious injury, or worse? I for one could not have a clear conscience if I had not brought it to your attention.) You as mayor, should do something about this problem: these dogs must be removed from Eftalou.

With friendly greetings,

Smitaki