Just as he knew from watching the film, it was an itinerant life, and his heart beat faster when he looked at a map and saw the names of other cities: Larissa, Lamia, Tripoli, Ioannina, Thessaloniki. He planned to visit them all.
Certain lines from the film had always lived with him:
O kalliteknis then einai ekeinos pou pezei violi i flaouto,
O kalliteknis einai etho.
Panagiotis often repeated them to his audience, who were all familiar with the film:
The artist is not the man who plays violin or flute,
The artist is here.
And with the final words, he pointed to his heart.
The couple whose image decorated his laterna were Jenny Karezi and Alekos Alexandrakis, the romantic stars of Laterna, Poverty and Honour, but people who stopped to listen soon knew that he had been in the film, too. Everyone remembered the scene with the small boys. Panagiotis became a celebrity and played up to his role, dressing grandly and making sure that people knew of his connection with the ‘big screen’.
After a decade on the road, this dapper figure decided that Thessaloniki was the ideal place to make his home. There was a constant influx of newcomers to the city so his potential audience was always refreshed by tourists, students and travelling salesmen. Gramophones were already in production but there were still plenty of people who preferred to dance to a laterna. He rented a small house in the old town, with a place to store the laterna on the ground floor, and settled into a pattern of playing in different squares and streets around the city.
Sometimes he would get a whole group dancing around him in Aristotelous Square, and then another circle would join on the outside, and then another. Eventually there might be three or four concentric circles. It was good for everyone when that happened and sales of everything benefited: salep, chestnuts, koulouria and even paper tissues.
Even as the years went by and the world began to see the laterna more as a form of begging than of culture, Panagiotis continued to believe in himself as an artist and people continued to throw coins and notes into his tambourine. The sound evoked a memory of innocence and they happily rewarded him for it. He took the money as his due, but spent only what he needed on his modest and simple life.
Over the years, he gained a reputation as the happiest man in Thessaloniki, untouched by the worries that caused his fellow street sellers such pain. Then one day, when he returned from a successful evening near the White Tower, he could see that his door was already open. When he reached it, he saw pinned to the frame an official-looking envelope. It was a warrant for his arrest.
He parked his laterna on the ground floor and, as usual, wearily climbed the stairs. Giving the door a huge shove to move an unseen obstruction on the other side, he made his way in. The whole floor was thickly carpeted with coins, and once he was inside Panagiotis tipped the day’s earnings on top of the rest. He then lit a candle that was sitting on a battered table and crunched across the carpet of coins that covered his floor to reach the sink. Having filled a cracked mug with water, he crunched over to his bed. The flicker of the flame caught the gold and silver edges of the coins and created a glittering pattern on the ceiling. Much of it was small change, not enough individually to buy a koulouri, but collectively it added up to millions. It was a treasure hoard. Panagiotis could hear a few coins trickling down through the floorboards, and he made a note to retrieve them in the morning.
The following day, the police returned with a search warrant. Panagiotis was already out somewhere in the city, turning the handle of his laterna. There was so much money in his house they would have to return with a truck. The judge would demand it as evidence.
It was decades’ worth of earnings. The police report that was printed in the local newspaper said that the coins were almost a metre and a half thick on the floor in some places. One of the taller officers had to stoop in order to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling. There were layers and layers in every denomination, millions of them, and it took a team of three police sergeants two weeks to count them all.
For sixty years, Panagiotis had not paid tax. Not even ten cents. By more or less ignoring his earnings, he believed he had retained his principle of noble ‘poverty’ (even if ‘honour’ had been compromised).
There was a long court case, during which he had no heart to play his laterna, even in the evenings. The tonnage of euros that was being stored in a bank until the case was over gradually dwindled and by the time the lawyer’s fees, tax and fines had been paid, all he had left was the laterna itself. Panagiotis’s main fear had been a prison sentence, but the judge felt that a financial penalty was the most appropriate one. ‘This is the punishment that best fits the crime,’ he said, signing papers that effectively took everything from the old man except his musical instrument.
‘I am still an artist,’ said Panagiotis outside the court, hatted and suited, with a carnation in his buttonhole. ‘And my laterna is all I need.’
When he died, a few years later, in the same bed in which he had been sleeping for nearly fifty years, his landlady found a note in his room saying that the laterna must go to his friend Tassos. She thought this must be someone among the street sellers, and it didn’t take her long to find the right man.
For Tassos, it was definitely a step up from selling paper handkerchiefs, but it wasn’t his vocation, as it had been for Panagiotis. He didn’t have the visceral connection with the laterna and he didn’t play with a smile. He could not take people back to a lost time.
As Tassos finished his story, a Ferrari roared by. The music that blasted from its open windows drowned out all other sound.
‘I miss the old days!’ he yelled above the din. He wasn’t just referring to the easy availability of any music, any time, any place. He was talking about the government wanting even street vendors to pay their dues now.
We ended up having a heated discussion about paying tax. I had never imagined that I would have such a debate in a Greek square with a man who busked for a living, but I learned a lot about the way in which some people here view the tax system. They simply don’t see themselves as part of it (just as Panagiotis hadn’t). This man, Tassos, did not feel that he should be obliged to pay even a cent of his earnings, however small the percentage. There was no connection in his mind between himself and the schools, hospitals, roads, street cleaning, and so on that have to be paid for.
His view was simply this: all politicians are corrupt and the money he would pay to the government would go straight into someone’s pocket. This attitude runs through the veins of the Greek people – and not entirely without reason. Billions have been stolen, wasted and squandered by people in high places over the past few decades, further deepening the vast, unpayable debt that now burdens this small country. So I partly understood why he felt as he did, but I couldn’t help asking him, ‘How will things ever get better?’
He didn’t have an answer, and the shrug of his shoulders gave me the impression that this individual did not care for society but only for himself: he was a one-man band in more ways than one. Until a new culture of transparency sweeps through the country, from top to bottom, what chance is there?
As our encounter came to an end (it reached an impasse very rapidly), I noticed that, close to where we stood, there was a set of overflowing bins. On the ground next to them lay a man. It was hard to tell if he was sleeping or dead.
I could not help making the connection in my mind between Tassos’s sense of himself as an individual without responsibility and the man lying on the street to whom the state can offer nothing. By the end of our conversation, I resented having given him even a euro.
In Greece, there are said to be places (as well as people like Tassos) that exist totally outside the law. People talk of towns and villages that are never visited by the police and run themselves almost as independent kingdoms. Perhaps they are pure legend, but I don’t imagine that all the stories are fabricated.
There was news coverage not
so long ago of a village on an island that had been left alone by the police for many years. When a new regional head of police was appointed, he decided to pay a visit. The villagers put up barricades and shot and wounded several police. When the officers finally went in, after days of siege, they discovered dozens of cash-point machines which had been wrenched from the walls of banks in towns all over the island, scores of Porsche Cayennes and many children who had never been to school. A thriving economy based on a highly lucrative drugs trade meant that the place had become a law unto itself. Such a village is rarely on a tourist map.
On my own journey, I occasionally arrived in a place that was a quintessential carte postale – and yet there was something not quite right about it, something that made me dislike it, a gut feeling, perhaps. Similarly, I went to places that were scruffy, but charming. Of course, this might have something to do with the time of day I arrived, the smile (or scowl) of a shopkeeper or the way a waiter greeted a traveller such as me. Whatever it is that makes a place welcoming or hostile is initially hard to define, but there is often an explanation.
After my stay in Thessaloniki, I took a week or so to make my way slowly down the east coast, passing through Katerini, Larissa, Volos and Lamia.
One day, not a great distance from Lamia, I visited a fishing village that was so pretty no painter could have done it justice. To get there, I drove down a bumpy road (little more than a track) through verdant meadows and past rows of ripening crops. Oranges and lemons were so plentiful that they lay in mounds, ungathered.
The village was ideally located, south-facing, with a sheltered natural harbour and colourful fishing boats moored in a tidy row. There was even a delightful sandy cove for swimming close by with pine trees right down by the water’s edge. Ancient olive trees with gnarled silver trunks grew in abundance on neighbouring hillsides. The residents seemed to have more than enough of everything.
As far as I could see from the displays in the seafront restaurants, compliant fish swam into nets to feed a population that had little or no interest in tourism. Everyone eating in them looked like a local and several gave a dismissive ‘tut’ when I asked if there was a table free. Evidence of their lack of interest in foreign visitors was that not a single shop sold sun lotion, straw hats or even a postcard. That’s unusual enough for a Greek seaside place. But the total lack of hotels, pensions or even signs saying ‘Rooms’ was almost beyond explanation.
This was a place truly lacking in filoxenia, hospitality. I swam, strolled around the village and, for the first time on this trip, felt like taking out my camera. I remembered how much pleasure I used to get from capturing a place on film. The familiar weight of my Nikon was comforting and I felt less conspicuously alone in a place which, like most, seemed entirely frequented by happy couples. Once it was dark I had an overpriced dinner (reluctantly served) and then drove out.
When I got to the main road, I did not stop for another fifty kilometres and, when I did, it was midnight and I was in a workaday town. I picked the first hotel I came to. Two stars, twenty-five euros for the night, and the crispest linen and most comfortable bed I have ever slept in. Breakfast was complimentary and included the best coffee I had tasted for weeks.
‘Will you be staying another night?’ enquired the owner, cheerfully bringing me a second espresso, before I had even asked for one.
‘Yes,’ I decided spontaneously. ‘I would love to.’
‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘You don’t have a fixed itinerary?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘I’m just following my nose. It’s the best way.’
‘Alone?’ he asked.
I nodded, but less sadly than I would have done a month or two before. The word had slightly lost its sting.
He seemed genuinely interested to know where I had been, so I described a few of my favourite places (many of which he had never visited himself). I told him about the previous day, about the strangeness of the place in which I had found myself. When I said the name, his reaction was immediate.
‘You went there?’ he said incredulously. He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Nobody goes there. Certainly not tourists.’
‘Why on earth not?’ I asked him.
‘It’s said,’ he replied darkly, ‘that something terrible happened there.’
What he told me more than explained my sense of unease.
HONEYMOON
VOYAGE DE NOCES
‘Jean-Luc, isn’t that beautiful!’ Sylvie said to her new husband as they drove past an old stone house. ‘Look at that gorgeous little cottage, with all the creeper, so romantique!’
With no knowledge of what had left these buildings in such a bad state (vendetta, death or tragedy were common causes), visitors saw only what they wanted to see, and such dereliction could charm, forming part of a tableau. Even the wrecks of wooden boats, once intended for repair, looked delightful in the sunshine.
‘Look at that! It’s almost sculptural, isn’t it, mon cher? Like a fish skeleton! Extraordinaire …’
Jean-Luc, who could not take his eyes off the road for fear of disappearing down a rut, grunted in response.
Sylvie and Jean-Luc, intrepid French young professionals, preferred to take a route other than the one well beaten by most holiday-makers. It was their third visit to Greece, and their honeymoon. They followed what was little more than a track down towards the sea. It was part of a satisfying illusion that they were discovering somewhere very few people had been. They wanted to dive beneath the glossy surface of the postcard and find themselves the ‘real thing’.
After their flight from Paris, which had been delayed, they were so eager to get on the road that neither of them noticed there was only a dribble of petrol in their hire car. By the time the light had alerted them, every petrol station was closed. Their top-of-the-range jeep finally juddered to a halt by the side of the road with the sun beginning to disappear behind the mountains.
They would have to find somewhere for the night. The road map tucked into the dashboard showed no signs of habitation for many kilometres ahead, but Jean-Luc consulted Google Maps, which indicated a few houses at the very end of a small turning off the main road a short distance ahead.
‘It’s a ten-kilometre walk, ma chérie,’ said Jean-Luc. ‘We’ll manage that, won’t we?’
The question was rhetorical. They had both walked up Mount Kilimanjaro the previous summer (it was where Jean-Luc had proposed). Ten kilometres was nothing.
They set off on foot, stuffing a change of T-shirt and their toothbrushes into Sylvie’s Hermès bag. After almost two hours of walking along a neglected, pot-holed road, they came to the houses. The windows were dark, and there were no cars parked outside.
‘I don’t think they are inhabited,’ said Jean-Luc.
There had been no signposts of any kind en route, nor had there been any turnings off the road. They took it in turns to illuminate the way with the flashlights on their mobiles.
‘Are you sure there’s anything down here?’ asked Sylvie.
‘The road wouldn’t be here unless it led somewhere,’ said Jean-Luc, with impeccable logic. ‘There’s definitely something there.’
As they walked, he consulted the vintage Patek Philippe on his wrist, a gift from Sylvie’s father when they got engaged. It was gone nine thirty.
Another group of houses came in sight not long after. They had reached the edge of a village.
‘Strange that it wasn’t on the map,’ commented Sylvie. It was almost a small town, by Greek standards.
Sylvie was charmed by the elegant pastel-coloured houses with pretty wrought-iron balconies and huge pots overflowing with basil. Her energy and enthusiasm for their adventure returned. Jean-Luc, however, was in a bad mood. He blamed his wife for the lack of petrol and the fact that they did not know where they would sleep, but most of all, for his hunger.
They came to a small street with some shops, but the butcher’s, baker’s and greengrocer’s were all closed.
�
�Why is everything shut?’ Sylvie asked her husband. ‘It’s a Friday night!’
They would have expected most things to be open at this hour.
‘How should I know?’ Jean-Luc answered grumpily. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
He pressed his nose up against a wine shop.
‘Looks like they have some excellent vintages,’ he said. ‘Pity it’s closed.’
The sight of some St Émilion premier cru in the window had almost cheered him up. Someone in this town appreciated good wine.
The village was strangely empty for a Friday in late April but they could not read the signs in the shop windows that explained why.
Even a kafenion they passed was shut and, in their walk through the town, they had so far not seen even one small pension.
Sylvie pointed at a sign. ‘I think that says “Police Station”,’ she said.
A small arrow pointed up to the first floor.
‘Maybe they’ll be able to help,’ she said. ‘I’ll just pop up and ask them.’
Sylvie had learned a few words of Greek and had her phrasebook tucked in her bag.
At the top of a long, narrow staircase she found a single door. As she knocked, the force of her hand pushed it open, and she found herself in an empty room. There was not a table or even a chair. It was just a high-ceilinged, windowless space painted light green with a noticeboard nailed to the wall on which were pinned some black-and-white mugshots. She shut the door and went back down into the street.
‘Any luck?’ asked Jean-Luc as she emerged.
‘Well, there can’t be much crime here,’ she said. ‘But maybe there are no hotels either.’
‘Merde!’ said Jean-Luc. ‘It looks like we’re going to be walking all the way back to the car and sleeping in it.’
Cartes Postales From Greece Page 16
