Winter Work

Summers here are long, hot and dry; fire is a constant concern.  Years ago, when the house and its surroundings were a working farm, grazing animals kept the woodland understorey clear. These days there are no grazing animals here; in order to protect the house, and ourselves, as much as possible from summer fire outbreaks we spend a good deal of our winter days cutting, clearing and burning on managed fires the saplings, dead plants and unwanted shrubs which are the dangerously flammable woodland understory.    As well as affording us some protection this pleasant, albeit physically taxing, work makes accessible an otherwise impenetrable wilderness, opening up new vistas and liberating previously hidden, handsome rocks and fine mature trees. The cleared paths and glades admit more light, delicious dappled sunlight, transforming a dark wilderness into something of a pleasant, cool and shady park. Added bonus returns for our work are the wild-flowers that spring from seeds which have lain dormant the soil, in some cases for decades. 

I am aware that we are interfering with nature but the interference is only temporary; nature will reclaim what is hers soon enough.

Ο Νικος Κυριοπουλος

Nico herding his goats, March 2008

On 23rd June my neighbour and good friend Nicos Kiriopoulos died; shockingly quickly after having his illness diagnosed only about six weeks previously.  Nico died in the house in which he was born seventy-six years previously and which, barring a few months military service, he hardly ever left for more than a few hours at a time.  The loss of any member of a community must alter it but Nico was the last of the village’s farmers; here there will be no new layers of humanity through whose industry the rent left by an elder passing might be covered.  Nothing in Mystraki will ever be the same again.

Nico, with his wife Fortini, farmed goats and olives, grew vegetables and kept domestic hens; they were as close to being self sufficient as it is possible to be in a largely retailer dependent society.

Through the century beginning soon after the exodus of Greece’s hitherto Ottoman masters and ending at the outbreak of the last world war, Mystraki developed as a clan farming community; the Kiriopoulos surname common, as yet it is, to every inhabitant.  Most of the land around the village that is not presently cultivated for growing olives, presently scrubby wilderness, once supported all manner of crops, not only to feed the human population but also the considerable animal population.  Domestic animals; pigs, goats, sheep, bovines, to provide meat and diary products for the table; horses, donkeys and oxen for transport and drawing bulk, water in particular, and agricultural implements.

Life made the landscape.  Animals foraging undergrowth kept woodland accessible; browsing goats adequately cleared inaccessible uncultivated land.  Water came to the hamlet of Valanidia, a kilometre beyond Mystraki and represented now only by my home, in ox-drawn bowsers, huge barrels laid horizontally on axels, keeping open a track from the village well in the valley between Velanidia and Mystraki to the house.  After the war increasing mechanization, better roads and cheap imported food led to the abandonment of the still almost mediaeval life of country villages in favour of what was considered a ‘better life’ in the cities.

When, in 1998, I arrived to take possession of the house, Nico was here to welcome me.  Why an englishman would want to buy and throw money for restoration at a mouldering eighty year old pile in which generations had been born, lived and died without any benefit of running water, sanitation or electricity, had obviously puzzled him but he was overwhelmingly grateful that I had chosen to do so; Nico appreciated and valued his environment, both natural and built.  A gentle man in every respect and a natural philosopher, Nico had had very little formal education.  Barely literate, although he had aspired to being able to write and read a shopping list, he was nonetheless an autodidact of all that is essential to life; horticultural skills, innate knowledge of when and where to sow and when to harvest; how to deliver into the world, raise, slaughter with compassion and butcher domestic animals; viniculture (although his wine is something of an acquired taste!), cheese making, bread oven maintenance, how to repair and fashion tools; repair and build shelter, how to magically improvise and re-cycle.  Much more than this Nico had cultivated the difficult art of thinking, of using the most primary sources to make sense of and know the sheer joy of living.  No one has taught me more about the privilege of living, of being able to feel the inner peace and tranquility that comes with being in harmony with the very rhythm of life than has Nico.  Rather than being formally taught, this learning was somehow assimilated from the man, by being with him during long contemplative silent conversations and, when he did try to verbally communicate, of understanding all he had to say about the seasons, weather, plants, diet and all that is good in the world; Nico had no capacity for negative ideas.  Nico and I did not share much spoken conversation, he did not have a word of english and I, even after half-heartedly studying the language for over fifteen years, can not claim a facility for speaking greek that is even close to fluent, but from our first meeting communication between us was never a problem and such greek as I have owes more than a little to Nico’s patience and understanding.

With Nico’s passing his goats will go from the village, the paths and tracks which their twice-daily wandering and browsing kept open will become overgrown and impassable.  In a matter of months fast growing wild pear will provide shelter for more vulnerable trees and shrubs which in turn will grow tall and strong and ungratefully shade out the wild pear that had protected them.  In very few years large areas of land will revert to impenetrable woodland.  It is a cycle of which Nico was, and we are, a part; a cycle that always was and will ever thus will be.

Building busyness

I shall have Sam here with me for another week.  With his help I have moved forward by a long way the outside kitchen of which I have been dreaming and spasmodically building for the past few years.  By the time Sam leaves next Sunday I expect to have the structures of  both the 'work surface' and the 'sink unit'  ready for plastering and finishing, leaving only the 'cooking unit'; pizza oven, barbecue and 'rocket stove' hot plates', and the parasol roof to finish to realise my long term ambition of having here a permanent outdoor food preparation and cooking facility.
Unfortunately, I can not be attending to both my building concerns and my recently found blogging interest.  With all the weight of my concentration presently falling on the building side, my amusements are out of balance but this will not always be so.

An interesting day

In another being I might have called it a bad day but my current being does not allow for bad days so I shall have to call it an interesting day.  (Has my life become no more than a series of euphemisms?)  After a rather silly night out with Sam in Finicounda I woke up very late.  For me, late waking is always good for an interesting start to a day, consequently I had to ease my rules of being and hurry, something I try to avoid, to the garage where Yanni was to fit a new drive shaft to my aging machine.  "How long", I asked, "Twenty minutes", he answered,  At once the vehicle was sent up on a jack and Yanni proceeded to fit the part, only to find that its bolt holes did not quite match those on my machine, they would have to be doctored, could I return tomorrow?  Back at home Sam helped me to re-establish my summer kitchen/dining room under the shade of the large and spreading crown of an old Carob tree; a natural parasol.  An important feature of the outdoor kitchen has, traditionally, been a supply of running water into a sink.   From a well about half a kilometre away I syphon my water into into a 1,000 litre reservoir tank in the shade of the wood, from where gravity feeds it to the sink.  But the tank had run dry.  Why?  At the well head it took little detective work to discover why; a second pipe, several times the diameter of my pipe had been introduced into the well.  The well end of the pipe was not, at the time, in the water, the other end snaked through the olive tress that surround the well.  It was all to easy for me to picture the monster pick-up truck bearing the monster petrol-driven pump that connected to this huge new pipe and furthermore to picture my syphon drawing its last drops as, in a very short time, the pump emptied the well.
This brutal raping of the well is symptomatic of a 'want it all, want it now' society.  Hereabouts, olive trees have flourished to produce adequate crops of olives for centuries, millennia even, but now the unsubstantiated word is out that if the trees  bearing them are watered, their olives will produce more oil.  Even if this myth of greater produce were to be substantiated, draining a well at regular intervals by brute force is a wonderful example of the shortsighted folly of taking more for less.  Wells and springs are delicate and, in a way, alive.  The sources of their continual replenishment are something of a mystery.  Not far from here, directly behind and below the level of a beach, a spring issues sparkling-clear sweet cool water which, it is said, originates under the Taygetos mountains some thirty kilometres or more away.  If this is true, to reach the spring fresh water must travel through subterranean passages deep below the Messinian Gulf.  Draining a well or pumping from a spring to increase its flow can cause the arteries that feed it to dry up until the well becomes no more than a dry hole.  This, of course, does not concern the unthinking; they will simply dig another well or sink a borehole deep into the earth in search of more water to pointlessly squander.  Until, of course, until........!  It is a sobering thought that while we can imagine some  kind of a life without oil, one that for our descendants will be real  rather than imagined, a life without water is totally unthinkable, indeed, without water life would cease to exist.

Linda

Linda, a neighbour for the past five years, left this morning; when she returns it will be as a visitor.  I first met Linda several years before she became my close neighbour.  She and her then partner, Ian, were launching a business to run and sell interest-associated holidays and had built a house here in Greece with that end in mind.  My attention was drawn to an advertisement in a magazine inviting people to telephone for a brochure about the holidays.  I had no interest in the holidays but, as in those days there were very few fellow Brits around, I was interested enough in the people who were behind the enterprise and interested to know from where they would be operating.  A phone call later I had learnt that the house they had built was only about a half-hour drive from my home.  The business seemed to flourish and we met moderately frequently.  Linda is a good administrator and an excellent vegetarian chef; an ex-safari chef.  Ian among many other things was an adroit installer and manager of their building's advanced and complex wind and solar power and solar heating systems .  Everything seemed to be going along quite nicely but subsequent events were to prove that they were not.  Ian became unsettled and returned to the U.K.  Linda carried on alone running the business for another season, while she advertised for new business partners but she, happier establishing enterprises than running them, was finding the going tedious and less than fulfilling.  Eventually her personal relationship with Ian ended,  the business ceased to be and the property was sold.  During the period that the business was operating, guests were accommodated in the main building while Linda, Ian and their staff slept in the grounds in three modern yurts that had been bought for that purpose.  The yurts were not included in the house sale. 
Around my house I have a large area of ground; largely unused, untamed rocky hillside.  Linda had nowhere to live but had three yurts and nowhere to put them.  It seemed obvious that she should live in her yurts on my spare land, and that is how Linda came to be my neighbour.  Initially she erected her yurts in the valley, sheltered from winter winds, but it was somewhat gloomy down there so she braved the winds and moved her yurts to a commanding position with spectacular views on top of a little knoll on the edge of the wood.  One yurt has served her as a living area, another as a bedroom, the third yurt she made a gift of to Velanidia, 'in lieu of rent' she said.  For five years this has been her home but she has taken many breaks of varying length, some to boost her economy, some to travel but always to do interesting things and visit interesting, unusual places; Petra, Mongolia, Easter Island, New Zealand, an Ashram in Kentucky, are some of the places that come to mind.
From what little I know of her life, Linda seems to be passing through it as a series of chapters.  Perhaps, in a way, we are all doing that, but Linda's chapters seem to be more clear cut than most; her african chapters, her south american chapters, her greek chapters, her english chapters and who knows what other chapters and what of the chapters yet to be written?  I know they will not fail to be interesting because Linda. a very interesting person is a rare bird in our increasingly uniform mid-grey times.
I shall miss Linda and I shall miss her yarns but there is a final chink in the curtains that will not be closed until October when Linda will be back to dismantle and hand over her yurts to their new owners and for her to lead the three-week, trans-Peloponnese stroll that she has spent hours of this year planning on behalf of a half-dozen or so of her regular tramping chums.  I hope I shall be fit enough to be up for it!.

Phocos SF50E refrigerator

Linda, who is leaving Greece, has passed on to me her Phocos SF50E refrigerator.  I tried, last year to buy one of these life improving gadgets but, according to their website, the German manufacturer had 'ceased to distribute this product in Europe'.  In common with many boats and motor-homes, my home here has only twelve volt, direct current, electricity.  This has not always been so.  For too many years I tried to emulate mains connected homes by feeding twelve volt battery power into an inverter which turned it into normal mains strength alternating current electricity.   This worked well enough during the summer but in the short, cool and invariably partly cloudy days of winter the power system had to be managed with great care, and electricity used with great restraint even so, after ten o'clock at night, there was no power left for the water pump; candles and oil lights were the only option for lighting.
Albeit slowly, I learn.  In a yacht chandlers I had entered, hunting down some odd artifact I believed I needed at the time, I  chanced to notice a stock of energy saving electric light bulbs identical to mine at home but marked '12V DC'.  I bought one, took it home to experiment with and was both surprised and delighted that it performed exactly as my existing light bulbs.
Water is pumped to outlets around the house by an ingenious pump.  The pump has a large chamber which is electrically pumped full with water.  Within the chamber a bladder full of pressurised air is compressed by the incompressible water.  When a tap is opened  the air in the bladder is able to expand to produce an instant flow of water.  Converting the pump to twelve volt was simply a matter of changing the electric motor but getting an adequate current to the motor did prove to be something of a problem which was eventually solved by adapting a pair of truck jump-leads to link pump to battery.  Nothing else that I use here draws high current so existing wiring is adequate.  Inexpensive car adapters are freely available for computers and mobile phones and many electrical appliances and tools in fact work with low voltage direct current electricity and have to have built-in transformers which can be more or less easily by-passed.  I am fortunate in this respect in having an electronics boffin living near by, it was he who converted the Yamaha Clavinova piano to work with a twelve volt supply.
The fridge will be a godsend; thank you Linda.