Further along the road from the spring there were two ruined stone houses at the bottom of a long ridge covered in firs and oaks. The houses were set a fair way apart but were the only properties at this edge of the village. Behind them and between were fenced animal enclosures, now empty and given over to wild fruit trees and weeds. Finally, we arrived at the village itself, built from the bottom edge of the same ridge. The road cut through the top end of the village, with most of it built to the right, where the land flattened out over a fertile plateau. The houses were solid stone constructions, with thick outer walls and protected courtyards to withstand the perishing mountain winters. Many were now wrecks, their roofs fallen in, the walls like skeletal remains sinking into the ground. Occasionally, in the midst of ruin was a renovated house, with neat repointed stone and pitched roofs, wooden balconies with planter pots and new shutters, firmly closed.
The village was fairly large but, squatting in the shadow of the Taygetos peaks, it seemed like nothing more than a small eruption of human endeavour. The peaks towered ahead like sentries. The highest, Profitis Ilias, which Angus told me was more than 7,000ft high and snow-capped in winter, was now a bare, geometric shape, as if the Egyptians had colonised the Peloponnese once and dragged blocks of stone here to create a pyramid. Other peaks ranged behind it, one after another, with sharp precipitous flanks, way into the distance towards the end of the peninsula, where they would finally peter out in desolate fields of spiky cactus, which characterised the Mesa Mani, the Deep Mani.
Angus told me that among the various explanations for the name ‘Mani’, some academics suggested it came from the female adjective of the word manos, meaning dry, treeless, waterless. It felt like we had reached the roof of the Mani here, and it would be hard to find a more remote place than this.
Angus parked on the road where another, larger, spring water outlet was set into a long arc of stone, with several taps over stone troughs. Perhaps animals came to drink here, or villagers congregated to do a weekly wash. The area had been richly served with water and much of the land seemed fertile, promising self-sufficiency in past years. Across the road was a sign pointing down a cobbled pathway to the plateia. Several houses bordered the path and at one crumbling wreck we saw an old couple sitting on a stone banquette chiselled into an outer wall, warmed by the sun. They were thin and hunched together, dressed in amorphous sun-faded black attire, the woman’s head swathed in a black scarf. They resembled two bundles of rags left out in the sun for an airing, only their eyes glistened, alert to this intrusion.
Angus said good morning. They nodded, nothing more.
“There probably aren’t many people here now. I’ve heard some of the old places have been done up by the families of the original owners, ones who left for Kalamata and Athens. They’re used as holiday homes now, but only in the summer. I think only a recluse would want to live this far up,” said Angus.
We arrived at the plateia, with a monumental plane tree in the centre. Angus explained that the Greek for plane tree was platanos, which accounted for the name of the village, and had nothing to do with the philosopher Plato. On the plateia were the remains of an old taverna and a kafeneio, with a poster on the front window for a musical evening five years earlier. The wide front windows offered a clear view inside, a glimpse into another era, the walls covered in old photos. A wood-burning stove sat in the middle of the room and rush-bottomed chairs and metal tables were set out, as if waiting for the regulars. I could even see items on the dusty counter: a metal box, pens, a few stubby wine glasses, an empty ouzo bottle. It was as if the owners had finished for the day, locked up and never came back.
The plateia was cool and quiet, with wooden benches set under the shady branches of the tree. At the southern end, over the roofs of houses, the dome of a large church peeked out, and beyond that the outline of the mountains. The place was deserted, but just as we decided to walk back to the car, the sound of a door creaking made us jump. We turned around to see a man at the wooden doorway of an old shop. The sign above it said pantopoleio, general store, written in a folky script, with the faded painting of a loaf of bread and a carafe of wine. It was perhaps the only store for miles around. The man was middle-aged, with a long, tired face and strangely pale blue eyes, not unlike Myrto’s. Perhaps a mountain attribute. He wore a suit that seemed a few sizes too large. Angus spoke to him briefly, and I could tell from the man’s responses he had a difficult rural accent.
“He’s asking us if we’d like to come in to his shop. He can make us some coffee.”
We trailed in after him. The shelves were stacked with rows and piles of dusty produce: tins and plastic packets, bunches of desiccated herbs, hessian bags filled with beans and lentils. It sucked the air out of the place and left you feeling slightly light-headed. At the far end of the shop was a scored wooden counter with an ancient cash register that probably didn’t work. I couldn’t imagine anyone bothering to ask for receipts in this place. The man, who introduced himself as Pavlos, ducked through a curtain to a back room to make coffee, bringing it out on a metal tray in small cups, with tall glasses of water. I really would have to learn to like Greek coffee.
He sat on the other side of the counter. He didn’t drink anything himself, but puffed on a cigarette, blowing lazy smoke rings towards a stained wooden ceiling. He and Angus talked for a while and my eyes wandered around the wall behind Pavlos. The space that had once been white was yellowing and was decorated with an interesting montage of church circulars, posters, handwritten notes, bills − all stuck in chaotic order − and a calendar with a saint’s picture above the month. The month showed May. There were black and white photos of villagers as well, mostly group shots, and the effect of the wall was a kind of rural storyboard depicting the final years of village life before extinction.
Angus turned to me. “Pavlos says this shop was built in the late 1800s. His family took it over in the 1950s. It used to provide goods for the whole village and, with the kafeneio and taverna, was the real hub of Platanos. Now it only opens on certain days in summer. In the winter there are only about eight full-time residents left, though the number swells to around 60 in summer, when people come back to their holiday homes, including foreigners.”
“Do they shop here?” I asked, casting an eye around the creaking shelves.
“No, they get in their four-wheels and go down to the nearest town, which is Kambos, to do their weekly shop, or to Kalamata. As the old Greeks die, the village is slowly dying as well. In a year or so he says he may have to shut the place for good. It’s the usual story with these villages.”
Angus continued his chat with the man for a while and when the conversation reached a lull, Pavlos sat back heavily in his chair, giving us a strange, inquisitive look.
“You seem to be getting a lot of information there,” I said, feeling hopeful.
Angus looked drained. “I’m starting to struggle a bit with his dialect though. It’s a hard job trying to make sense of things. I could do with a translator. I’ve just asked him whether he’s ever heard about any British soldiers hiding out here in the war. He says as a kid he remembered hearing stories from the villagers about a few allies trekking through the mountains, but he doesn’t know whether they stopped here or not, or if anyone in the village helped them. Well, I didn’t think we’d be that lucky, first off. He says there is no-one living here now who was more than a kid during the war, like the old couple we passed, even though they looked 100,” he said with a wink. “There were a few old-timers in their 90s, until recently, but they have all gone to live in other locations with their families, or else they’ve died. He says many villagers have left in the past decades for Athens and for places like Australia and America. They rarely come back, or if they do, it’s for a special reason, a saint’s day.”
“Did you mention Kieran?”
“Yes, briefly. He said he was sorry, that was all, and he was grateful to the allies, but it was a difficult time for everyone.”
“He’s going to ask around a few village contacts and call me if he comes across anything useful.”
“Call your mobile? The one you never answer?”
“Well, yes, that’s the best I can do.”
Before we left I asked if I could take pictures of his shop. I didn’t think I would ever come across a place like this again. Pavlos shook our hands and wished us well. He leaned on the door frame of the shop, smoking, as we strolled back towards the main road. I had a strange feeling that he never stopped watching us until we were out of sight.
“Is he the only guy we can talk to today?” I asked.
“Looks like it, which is a pity,” said Angus, sounding weary. “I don’t know what it was, but I felt Pavlos was reticent to talk. Perhaps he knows more than he can say. I just wish my Greek was up to all this.”
When we reached the car, Angus walked to the nearby spring outlet and splashed his face with the cool water, as if trying to ramp up his mood a bit.
“You’re not feeling defeated already?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not defeated, Bronte. I’m panicking. I wish I’d done all this years ago, when there were more people around here.”
“You didn’t have all those internet stories then, so you would never have thought to come up here.”
“Aye, that’s true, but I still have the feeling I’ve left it all a bit late.”
We stood for a moment by the spring, enjoying the solitude of the place. A gentle breeze was twirling leaves around the empty space and bees and hornets were droning over the overflowing water troughs.
I had goaded Angus about feeling defeated already, but I felt the same just from the first impressions of Platanos. The closed houses and shops, the lack of people. It augured badly for the mission. We needed years, instead of weeks, to undertake it. And a bit later, the feeling would be heightened.
“Let’s just drive on for a bit. It’s grand just to look at this mountain scenery. We might as well get something out of the day after hiring this thing,” said Angus.
The ridge that lay along the eastern edge of Platanos began to peter out and on a gentle rise that was partly cultivated we could see stone circles that Angus said were old threshing circles that had been used up to late last century, when the villagers grew wheat to make flour. We passed nothing else, apart from a few animal enclosures and sheds. Further on, past a copse of wild pear and almond trees, that seemed to grow in abundance here, we came to a dilapidated farm building with a battered flat-bed truck parked beside it. There was a fenced field with goats tethered to trees and a fierce-looking dog. Close by, we saw a man standing by a water trough. Angus stopped the car.
“This has to be the last guy standing today. Let’s go and talk to him,” he said, adjusting his baseball cap and smoothing his ponytail, as if grooming were at all required in this far-flung place. We picked our way down a narrow dirt track towards the farm. The man eyed us shrewdly, under a big straw hat. He wore a long plaid shirt, muddy down the front, and stout boots. Angus spoke to him for a while. The man looked ill at ease, glancing from one of us to the other. When he spoke he had a gravelly voice, like a low bark, as if he’d spent too much time out here on his own with farm animals. I didn’t like the look of him at all.
Angus turned to me. “This guy is one of the few villagers who stays during the winter. He probably keeps his eye on things, with the help of that feral mutt over there,” he said, flicking his gaze towards the slavering beast straining against its chain. “I’ve just asked him the same things I did with Pavlos, but I didn’t say Kieran was my father. He doesn’t know anything about allied soldiers. He was born just after the war. He’s taking a philosophical approach, tells me to forget about the past, about the battle. ‘What happened, happened.’ Now there’s the crisis to worry about. He tells me that trying to dig up the past will be useless and no good can come from it. Time to move on, he says, and I think he means that in a literal sense, as in ‘push off’. Angus turned his back to the man and rolled his eyes. “Let’s go then.”
“So soon?”
“It’s useless, pet. This man would rather grapple with razor wire than talk to us.”
We headed back towards the car. When we got there we turned around to check out the farmer. He was still standing where we left him, staring at us hard. I felt I was acting in a low-budget spaghetti western.
On the road back to Kalamata, we didn’t see another vehicle the whole way. At the bottom of the mountain road, the village of Ayios Yiorgos (Saint George) clustered round a tiny, scruffy square. There was a kafeneio and a taverna that were both unremarkable, yet Angus had a mind to eat lunch in the taverna, claiming he was famished from our mountain ‘expedition’. I was, too, but I wasn’t drawn to the taverna, with its greasy plate-glass frontage and the two grizzled villagers sitting outside at a wooden table. They watched our approach with the same suspect glances we’d witnessed in Platanos, as if we’d come to annexe their village.
The Maniots, as I had just read in one of Angus’s travel books, were tough people who had a violent history, with warring clans in past centuries building tall stone towers clustered on hilltops to repel interlopers with land-grabs in mind. It was all very reminiscent of Scottish highland struggles, or Sicilian vendettas. Even the pugnacious Turks during four centuries of occupation had not managed to conquer the Mani, though there had been frequent incursions into the area. Suspicion of interlopers, it seems, was branded onto their genes. Metaphorically, some of them seemed to be still living in towers.
Angus noticed my lemony expression as we entered the taverna.
“I asked Pavlos about lunch places and he mentioned this taverna.” It was a dubious recommendation, coming from a man whose pantopoleio was sadly nothing more than a folk museum now.
A sign on the door promised that no dish would cost more than four euros, and Angus laughingly called it ‘the crisis café’. The inside space had a wood-fired stove and half-a-dozen tables and chairs. A middle-aged man with a bushy moustache came out of a doorway and seemed affable enough. Angus let him yammer away in his fractured English, probably too exhausted from all his Greek.
The guy ran through the whole menu verbally, from entrees to desserts – every last bean and lamb chop − which was amusing as I couldn’t imagine he could rustle up half of what was on this extensive ‘menu’. He was having a laugh perhaps. He ushered us through a side door to an outside terrace, which was more pleasant. It was shaded by a grapevine now bereft of grapes. It looked out towards the wooded bluff of the mountainside, where a few goats were scrambling about. Two Greek men sat in one corner of the terrace, eating and smoking.
We took a table in the opposite corner. I can’t say my appetite was sparked by the place, especially when I slipped off to the toilet and found a mingin’ space buzzing with fat flies, and no soap at the basin. Angus must have noted my sickly expression when I returned and tapped the back of my hand. “Don’t worry, pet. Lots of rural tavernas look like this and they’re absolutely fine,” he said, with raw confidence.
Angus had ordered and when the meal arrived it was surprisingly tasty: pieces of oven-roasted chicken with peppers, chips perfectly fried, and a mountainous Greek salad. We shared a carafe of white wine.
“See, it’s not so bad here, is it?” said Angus, giving me a shrewd look and quaffing his wine.
“No, not bad at all,” I said, swirling my bread through the olive oil in the salad, having forgotten my recent funk over oil lakes. “Anyway, how do you think we did today, up there?”
He shrugged. “Och, I don’t know. It’s a bit like being an archaeologist, isn’t it? You assume there’s something to be found, but it’s a case of knowing where to start digging. We’re going to need more help to track down info. I’ve always found Kalamata Library to be helpful but in the past I’ve only researched the war, and not mountain
villages. Maybe I’ve missed things. Time to go back, I think.”
“Didn’t you say you’d talk to Myrto and Leonidas?”
His face looked sour. “After my experience today, I worry that maybe everyone from Marathousa will feel the same as they do in Platanos. No-one will want to dig up the past. Myrto can be thorny. Maybe you can pick Leo’s brains.”
“Me?”
“Why not, pet? You’re more charming than me.”
“Well, that’s a no-brainer, isn’t it? And you’re calling me ‘pet’ again,” I snapped. I wondered if the moniker wasn’t just a tiny act of defiance on his part.
“Sorry. I keep forgetting,” he said, summoning the owner for the bill. He wandered over to the table and scrawled the amount on the paper tablecloth. It was pretty cheap: nine euros. Angus only had a 20 euro note. The guy took it and pulled a wad of banknotes out of his pocket, peeling off a 10 euro note. Angus flicked me a look of surprise at the sight of all this cash. There was no offer of a receipt. It was easy to see why tax and VAT revenues in Greece were going down the pan.
“First time our village?” said the owner.
Angus nodded.
“You been up the top there to Platanos? What you think of village?”
“Not many people about these days.”
“Nobody wants to live in mountains now. Always a hard life. And once there was no road, only the kalderimi.”
“Where is the kalderimi?” asked Angus, his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm.
“If you drive back out the village and take the road to the right, just over the little bridge, you go maybe five, ten minutes, you come to very nice area with a church of Ayios Yiorgos. Not far from here you find sign for the kalderimi.”
A Saint for the Summer Page 9
