Armchair Traveller

A Walk Through the Heart of Crete

Christopher Somerville

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781907973338
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

For Somerville this was a kind of pilgrimage, a journey unlike any he had undertaken in 20 years of travel-writing. It was an expedition where he traded the usual comforts and certainties for a real physical and mental challenge, with no mobile phone or other technological aids. The only plan for his journey was to begin in the East at Easter and finish at Whitsun in the extreme West, at the Monastery of the Golden Step, whose gold step, legend says, can only be seen by those who have purged themselves into purity. During his 300-mile walk, he tackled four mountain ranges, high slopes and the numerous gorges of the West. Speaking only basic Greek and trying to follow a poorly way-marked path, he had to rely on his own instincts when climbing mountain passes and crossing high plateaux, farming and shepherding country, where villages are scarce and each night's accommodation was uncertain. He saw a Crete few ever encounter.

Lotus Land: Amari interlude

‘I am like a green olive tree in the house of God.’

Psalm 52

Each morning I am woken around five o’clock by the braying of the old donkey that lives on the hillside below my bedroom window. The donkey belongs to Nikephoros, the white-bearded healer of Thronos, and eats its own weight of God knows what, all day, every day. It never utters except to roar in the dawn, a signal for the village cocks to tune up and make with their one-word salutation. They in turn set off the dogs, who have been observing – more or less – their nightly three-hour truce in the barking war they have been waging with the dogs of Kalogeros and Vistagi for the past 4,000 years.

I groan, swear, turn over and thump the hard pillow to make a barrier between me and the dawn choristers outside. In the rooms along the balcony each side of mine I can hear Patricia Clark and David and Wanda Root doing much the same thing. Snoring resumes on both flanks. But it’s no good as far as I am concerned – now the bloody finches have noticed the first flush of morning light touching the horn-shaped apex of the mountain of Katsonissi that stands opposite the village, and they, too, begin to chip their four eggs in. More groaning, more swearing, and I slop out of bed and go out on the balcony, scratching and yawning like a tramp.

Of course it’s beautiful out there. The light is between pearl and peach, the air cool but holding the promise of a warm spring day. There’s a hint of wild sage and a breath of wood-smoke. Beyond the balcony, the picnic terrace and miniature vineyard of the Taverna Aravanes give way to an enormous prospect. The whole of the eastern side of the Amari Valley is in view, sloping away south-eastwards for the best part of ten miles. To my right, across the donkey’s hillside and a steep little valley beyond, rise Katsonissi and other hills nameless to me, the dawn light broadening across their slopes, their ridges marching down towards the bulgy and ill-shaped lump of 3,300-ft Mount Samitos which hunches like an island to split the smooth south-eastward flow of Amari. It’s all green and pleasant enough over there, as it is far below along the valley floor where well-watered meadows and pale green cornfields lie among the trees. But my gaze, as always, is drawn towards the east, high above the villages scattered on the slopes there, over the tight white huddles of Kalogeros and Vistagi, above Platania and Fourfouras beyond them, way up over the zigzag dirt roads and the dark forests of pine and prinos, up 6,000 feet by bare rock canyons and the skirt of the snowline to the twin-horned head of Psiloritis, still velvet dark with its back to the sunrise, outlined against the last of the night’s stars.

This view never ceases to do the trick and bring a smile to my face, no matter how sore my fingertips from yesterday evening’s laouto-playing or how many tumblers of Lambros Papoutsakis’s glutinous home-made wine showed their bottoms to the moon after midnight. I drink a glass of water, fetch pen and notebook from my bedside, and stealthily ease the balcony chair to the table. Nikephoros’s donkey has stowed its gab for the day, but Maria Papoutsakis is already at work below, picking tender vine leaves to make dolmades with soft, crisp plucking noises. There’s a sputter of two-stroke across the valley as another early riser scooters along the back road through Kalogeros. While my fellow guests and carousers continue their interrupted slumbers, I sit in the soft blue light of early morning and make up some doggerel – or donkerel – in tribute to Thronos’s long-lived and long-eared public alarm clock. Apart from eating a few more of the oranges I bought from the fruit-man, this – unbelievably, deliciously – is all I have to do today.

Donkey dawn

Before the sun begins to glow

On valley fields or mountain and thick, snow.

Before the day is truly born,

Thronos awakes to donkey dawn.

I lie cocooned inside the deep

Contentment of a sweet night’s sleep,

Until I hear that first forlorn

Unearthly sound of donkey dawn.

How pleasant it would be to glide

To morning’s shore on songbirds’ tide,

Instead of being rudely torn

Out of my dreams at donkey dawn.

I jerk awake when first I hear

That opening, long-drawn, brassy blare –

No Cretan driver honks his horn

More stridently than donkey dawn.

A breathless silence then ensues,

As at receipt of awful news;

A second’s hush, that soon will spawn

The real row of donkey dawn.

Is that a smoker being sick

With laboured heavings hoarse

Or is it timber being sawn

Inside my head at donkey dawn?

It sounds as if the village pump

Is being worked with wheeze and bump,

Slowly, with handles old and worn,

By sadist fiends at donkey dawn.

And now the roosters raise their din,

And all the village dogs join in;

The last vestige of peace is shorn

From hill and grove at donkey dawn.

I will not stand it one day more

My bags are packed and at the door;

By all the curses I have sworn,

I will be quit of donkey dawn.

Yet when I wake in Bristol town,

Where noisy cars roar up and down,

And students vomit on my lawn –

I’ll miss the sound of donkey dawn.

During the Second World War, Allied officers working clandestinely with the Cretan resistance nicknamed the Amari Valley ‘Lotus Land’. They came to love its abundance of the earth’s good things and the open-handedness of its villagers. Nothing has changed. Amari is green, Amari is fruitful. Amari has mineral-laden streams off the mountains to water its gardens and carpets of wild flowers to clothe its roadsides. Floating in its wide cradle of mountains 2,000 feet above the noisy, nervy, tourism-orientated world of the coast cities, Amari tends its gardens, its olives and vines, its figs and walnuts. Individual sounds travel far between the echo-boards of the mountains, muted and softened by distance: the orange-seller groaning ‘Portokali-aaaaaa!’ through his cab-mounted speaker, a radio sending a whining snake of a lyra tune out through the almond blossom, the dogs of Vistagi issuing their eternal sore-throated warnings. Everyone takes time, everyone gives you a nod and a word: Nikos the joker with the walnut tree in his yard, George the taverna laouto-player and conversationalist, Andonis the church cantor and lyrical lyra-player, and the three men named Kostas whose path I cross most days: Kostas Pervolia the green-handed gardener, Kostas Raki the village raki-maker, and Kosti Lyra the goat-eyed musician from neighbouring Kalogeros, a master of the lyra who can make those three strings scream, sing and sob as if an angel were behind them – or maybe a devil.

Now between the horns of Psiloritis the high saddle of the mountain darkens. A fingernail of silver pokes up behind the snowy ridge, turning to gold even as I squint at it. The cocks of Thronos redouble their monologue. The crescent becomes a spinning silver-golden ball, unbearably bright, appearing to dance between the bull-horns a second before lifting off to float free into the china-blue sky. Minoans must have watched this daily crowning of the great mountain from their peak sanctuaries across the valley, Dorians from the city state of Syvritos on the flat hilltop behind Thronos, Byzantines and Venetians from the square by the little frescoed church, Turkish janissaries and German soldiers on reprisal duties from the smoking ruins of Amari villages. Now it is this middle-aged tourista who raises his eyes from his half-finished verses to the dazzle and drama over Psiloritis.

‘Good morning, Lord Christopher,’ says Maria Papoutsakis, coming into the big taverna room with her arms full of greenery.

‘Good day, Lady Maria,’ I riposte, ‘and how are you today?’

‘Well, thank you, Lord Christopher. And you also?’

‘Yes, very well, thank you, Lady Maria.’

We are still at the stage, Maria and I, of addressing each other with some formality – she, because her manners are excellent; I, not to be outdone in the offering of courtesies, but also because I like the sound of this stately ‘Kyrie Christophere’ and ‘Kyria Maria’. It lends a graceful gallantry to our exchanges that transcends the generally mundane subject matter:

‘Lady Maria, do you perchance have a plug for the basin in my room, if you please?’

‘Why, certainly, Lord Christopher, here is one.’

‘Thank you so very much, Lady Maria.’

‘Lord Christopher, please – the pleasure is entirely mine. Thank you.’

Patricia Clark, my Canadian next-room neighbour, is mightily tickled by this, and insists on addressing me at all times as ‘Lord Christopher’. Patricia is a classicist from Victoria University, Alberta, a fluent speaker of Greek, over in Crete for three months to continue her long-term study of the islanders’ traditional methods of healing – by herbs, by folk remedies and by magic. She says that all three of these branches of practical medicine are alive and thriving in the Amari Valley. Last year, researching traditional use of plants in the Amari, Patricia stumbled across a handwritten book of medical recipes and treatments, spells, charms and magical rituals, compiled in 1930 by a local healer – an incomparable treasure. Now she sits with Maria Papoutsakis, sorting vine leaves into various sizes on the big taverna table. They mean to make a big pile of dolmades for today’s memorial ceremony for an old man of Thronos who died six months ago. It is proper to remember the dead at certain intervals after their passing.

I take a cup of coffee and sit out on the steps barefoot in the early sunshine. Since crossing Psiloritis yesterday and descending into Lotus Land I have scarcely given my feet a thought. Now I make a damage inspection, the first in the hundred miles since Kritsa. Left foot, existing damage: little toenail now turned from blue to grey, and hanging loose (it falls off as I touch it, and another, pink and perfect, is revealed in its place). Blister inside front heel still there; blister on ball of foot now flattened. The whole ball and heel a rather disgusting, rubbery yellow hide, pitted with black holes – none of this, strangely, to be seen on the other foot. Blister on outside of big toe still there, and has been joined by a little friend. New stuff: big burst blister on 4th toe, rubbing against and partly underneath 3rd toe. Large and bloody abrasion blister on outside of ball of big toe. Curious blemish like a double wart on top of root of big toe. Hmmm. Right foot, rather better. Existing damage: Achilles abrasion almost healed, rub marks ditto, blisters now burst and healing nicely. New stuff: small blister on outside of big toe. And something very new and sensitive to the touch coming up on the outside. Watch this space. As for olfactory forensics: Stinkerismo Grandissimo would about cover it. Memo: why do feet smell of goat? Why not of bread, or dog, or roses? I hobble back upstairs. I intend to spend at least a week here in the Amari, maybe more, to give the snow that now covers the White Mountains the maximum possible chance to melt away and leave me clear passage. In the meantime, bed calls, and those oranges. Maybe another poem, too.

Towards evening I sit on my balcony and stare out at Psiloritis. There is no escaping the dominance of the horned mountain, rearing like a breaking wave over Amari. A saddle of snow lies between the peaks. High over Vistagi the snow has part-melted into a curious figure like that of a football-headed man with no arms, a long torso ending in two straddling white legs. It reminds me of Karen Raeck’s Andartis flattened in midstride to the Nida plain, or of one of those giant figures cut into the chalk downs of southern England. With bees buzzing murmurously among the hillside herbs below and the sun striking warm through the valley, I contemplate the mountain and my own fears and falterings.

In the evening Patricia returns from the old man’s memorial with a dish of koliva. It’s the traditional titbit at such ceremonies – sugary, fragrant, seeded with little silvery sweeties. Greeks have been making it since long before the birth of Christ. Patricia tells us how it’s done, from what she has herself been told by the village women. Boil wheat with the leaves of an orange tree. Sieve it. Spread it out and roll it on lemon leaves. Add to the broth: orange leaves, sesame, cinnamon, chickpea flour, sugar, salt, walnuts, raisins, pomegranate seeds, nuts, parsley. Incense it well with a church censer. Take a tray of it in procession to church, covered with sugar and decorations, along with raki, oil and a lit candle. Thus one eases the path of the soul.

The high man

The high man straddles over Vistagi:

not that they see him there, though their

dogs bark warnings day and night.

Theirs is a spring view, a window looking

west into the bowl of Amari, green

watered valley, terraced and tended, where

grass lies lush, bees investigate new sage.

Behind their back the high man walks

winter, behind the bald nape of the gorge,

above road scar and tree line.

Yesterday I learned that ground

for dear life, breathlessly hammering

each step with my heel, descending the snowfields

and rock slides where the high man hid.

Cold fingers stroked my neck, cold breath

told of his closeness as I passed,

seeing only snow hard packed into a gully.

Watching him now through vine and olive leaves,

deep in the drowsy valley, I see

the high man small and shrinking. The sun

will have his head, Salome-like;

trunk and legs will run through the forest;

all the springs in Vistagi will sing

the high man’s prophecy of summer.

I know him now. Away from green pastures,

up every rocky track, the high man

walks winter and waits for me.

We eat with Maria Papoutsakis, dolmades, salad and damp new chee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Talking to myself
• Out East (Kato Zakros to Kritsa)
• Upcountry Village: Kritsa Interlude
• The Plains of Plenty (Kritsa to Asites)
• Across the Roof of Crete (Asites to Thronos)
• Lotus Land: Amari Interlude
• To Sfakia: A Rock and a Hard Place (Thronos to Chora Sfakion)
• The Gorges of the West (Chora Sfakion to Paleochora)
• Of Earth and Dreams (Paleochora to Hrissoskalitissas)
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgements
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR