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Converations from Tripolis

I have walked from Tripolis to Kakouri. One third of the distance might include the outskirts of Tripolis, until you reach the provincial road to Levidi that crosses your path perpendicularly. After this the road narrows. There is a small church on cement stilts opposite on the right. The road narrows and has a shiny tar surface, spotted with sheep droppings that have been flattened into black discs on the grey road.

After that you pass a place called Xania, which is halfway between town and village. It is a collection of a few houses, stables and chairs on the side of the road that used to welcome villagers on the way back from the market at Tripolis in the days when they too used to walk to peddle their wares. They would have had hard earned cash in the scarves around their necks, some of which could be spent on a coffee or cooled water with cherry preserve.

After this on the right you can see Analipsi, the mountain above Kakouri. It is covered on an oak bush called pournari for the lower two thirds. The peak is at about 1800 meters, and is rock and screed. Just above the junction of the pournari there is a small plateau facing Tripolis and if you lock closely you can see the white walls and red tiles of a tiny church called Analipsi, The Resurrection.

After Xania, below Analipsi, is a small round hill called Kortsouli, with the ancient city of Mantinea at its feet. The road to Old Man Simbonis’ farm runs along the outer boundary wall of great stone blocks that are 2500 years old, and everyone referred to his farm as Kortsouli. An everyday term used easily that encompassed a whole civilization of proud farmers and warriors.

After Kortsouli, also on the right, is a taller round hill, with another church, this time Agio Ilia. This is hidden amongst the pines on the crest. This saint’s churches are always on the top of mountains or hills, closer to the sun, after which he is named.

The road curves slightly, left here, right there, but there is no altitude change from Tripolis to Kakouri, until you enter the village which straddles the foothills of Analipsi. From Agio Ilia you enter an avenue of plane trees, their white fluff ball blossoms covering the road like snow in late summer. A few of the trees are missing, like a tooth missing in the gnarled mouth of a villager. In the missing tree’s place is a small iconostasio, in remembrance of the young person who died driving too fast on this quiet road. If the tragedy was recent, or if they were really loved, there is a fresh bunch of flowers lying inside with the burning olive oil wick.

As the avenue ends you enter the village, with Simbonis’ house on the right and the old Manelis house on the left. My grandmother grew up as a Manelis there. In front, in the elbow of the fork, is a bigger iconostasio for The Ascension, and on the right is the now disused village spring, where we used to fill our large glass wicker covered bottles for house water when we first arrived in the village.

If you follow the left fork, towards Levidi, at the first intersection 150 meters further on is our house, the Patriko, on the left opposite corner.

The Iconostasio Analipsi in the elbow of the fork of the road as you enter Kakouri
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Conversations on Blessings

My father would always say we should count our blessings.

We always had to go to church on St. John’s day, 6 January, when the priest blesses everyone in church with Holy Water from the Epiphany sprinkled with a sprig of Sweet Basil. The heady mix of a summer day in South Africa, incense, candle wax and the Basil mades one feel blessed without any further ado. But kissing the big gold Crucifix in the priest’s left hand while he sprinkled the Holy Water on you head, cooling the day and your thoughts, was the ultimate blessing.

Until he occasionally got confused and made you kiss the wet Sweet basil and sprinkled your head with a heavy gold Crucifix!

Blessings are important in most cultures, but doubly so in Greece and for the Greeks. Any new building or venture needs to be blessed, and the priest is engaged for the engenia. Obviously babies need to be blessed, and important farm animals and vineyards also need blessing. Domestic pets do not feature, but I am sure if the Orthodox had a St Francis he would gladly bless the arrival of a new precious pet.

The first engenia I remember, a sort of roof wetting, was the blessing of the cellar at 45 Kakouri. After the squatters had been moved out and a house built for them in the village at my father’s expense, Number 45 was quite run down. The cellar was a mess of storage and animal waste and was not desirable.

The cellar was cleaned out, the floor was dusted with sawdust and barrels of wine were installed. The grey double doors which were low and forced you to stoop when entering were painted with a fresh coat. The inside walls of rock were painted with whitewash that left a sweet moist aroma, like bread still to be baked. The six cement steps leading down to the cellar had their edges trimmed in the same whitewash. I remember whitewashing the walls once, with a great big wooden brush that allowed you to slosh the limestone mix happily over the dirtied wall. It was quite therapeutic.

Our whole family was present, with both grandmothers, Big and Small Giagia. All the village friends were invited but the main players were the two men who were to become my father’s greatest friends. Old Man Vlachos and Old Man Simbonis. They were both almost twenty years older than my father, but embraced his desire to be part of the village and sprinkled his life with simple wisdom and love.

The evening of the engenia of the cellar arrived and sheep on the pit were brought from Tripolis. Feta and olives were laid out and the newly pressed Retsina barrel was drilled so that a spigot could be inserted after the sudden rush of pink fluid.

The village priest blessed the proceedings, there were speeches and then people ate and danced. They danced and laughed into the early hours of the morning. Old Man Vlachos drank so much he passed out, and they remaining men carried him home in a funeral procession. They laid him in his wife’s outdoor oven, lit candles around him and closed the door.

I am not sure who was more shocked: Dina when she opened the door to bake and found her husband lying there, or the Old Man who woke dry throated surrounded by heavenly candles in the dark?

My Father's First Trip to No 45 Kakouri 1968
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Conversations on Directions

My father always drew a distinction between a house and a home. The former was a shell that was never filled with love or tradition; the latter was filled with family, love, tradition, happiness and sadness. As Zorba the Greek might have paraphrased: “A home held the whole catastrophe”.

Before Greece started its cadastral records for the European Union our house in the Arcadian mountain village of Kakouri had no number, yet everyone knew where we stayed and any visitor could easily be directed from entry into the village. After the avenue of plane trees take the first fork left. At the next intersection our house is diagonally opposite you on the left. And if they lost their instructions they would usually stop at the fork and ask directions of the nearest house, which happened to belong to Caterina Simbonis.

Caterina was a big buxom bossy woman whose small sharp eyes in her round face always peered through her window covered in white lace to see who was coming to the village. At its peak there were no more than 1200 residents in the village. The population has dwindled to a few hundred, and in 2011 the primary school finally closed its doors for lack of youth to teach. So it was easy for Caterina, who was married to my father’s best friend George, to keep up with visitors to the village.

On being asked directions to our house she would squeeze her ample body, plaid blue dress with a black scarf as a belt and her tight bun of grey hair neatly tied, smelling of garlic and goats, into the usually small Fiat rental car. Sometimes the guest’s wife had to get in the back, knees up against her ears while Caterina easily spoke nonstop in Greek to the visitor, irrespective of whether they understood her.

She would motion left at the intersection and do her cross at the churchlet to the Resurrection. Then point straight up the road   and put her hand up to stop at the next intersection and as she said “Takis, Takis” excitedly she would motion for them to park at the house, like some graceful traffic policewoman. She would get out, nudge the gate open and call out for Takis, my father, if she could not see him under the grapevines on the veranda.

He would appear and she would say she has brought guests. He would welcome them and greet them, and introduce them to Caterina. She would embrace them, give them a double cheek garlic kiss and from that moment on they were part of her family.

After the cadastral records were formalised the house was given the number 45. Nothing changed with the number that was the same as our home number in South Africa.

Caterina Simbonis, Second from the Left
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Conversations about Travel

Old Man Simbonis told me this when I went to Greece this year. Somehow I remember him telling me this whenever we spoke:

“Travel broadens the mind.”

He has had a stroke now and is bed bound. His mischievous eyes always alert sparkle when he gets visitors. Tiny drops of tears from in the corners of his yes when he blinks. The window in his bedroom where he lives faces the mountain. There are pale blue shutters that are closed at night, and in the day warm light streams in through the skirt of crochet that covers the lower half of the window.

My father used to say the same thing:

“Travel broadens the mind.”

In truth, although I have said we lacked for nothing, especially books, he also made sure that we travelled. We fought against just spending Greek summers in the village, but he was just teaching us to budget. He never taught us how to budget money, but now that I think of it, he taught us how to budget time and travel.

If I said it another way, I could have asked him to go to Greece as often as I liked, and he would have sent me. But I had to have a good reason to broaden my mind to travel somewhere. If he thought it would do the trick, then I was allowed to go. One year I hatched an expensive plan to go into the Central Kalahari with Izak Barnard, son of the great Bvekenya. I cannot remember if I motivated for the broadening of my mind or just begged my father to allow me to go. Somehow he paid the fee, which was more than a flight to Athens, and let me go. I am not sure what he was thinking when he dropped me off early one December morning in 1982. I remember he always made me carry a credit card for an emergency, and that I should not hesitate to use it if needs be. A few years later I did used it, in a different kind of emergency, but that is another story.

Thinking of Simbonis and travel always conjures up that trip into the Kalahari. Our arrival was heralded by heavy rains that filled great pans with water deep enough to swim in to cool off. We had to walk through many of the deep drifts to check the condition of the sand below for the vehicles to cross. We were deafened by hundreds of bullfrogs that had come to life under the overnight greening of the acacia trees.

The San were the ultimate villagers of the world. Without understanding their language we communicated and bonded like human beings. It was far removed from the Parisian language barrier I was to experience later. I have beautiful slides of my 2 weeks with the San. And amazing memories.

We camped about 500 metres from where they had erected shelter. On the last night two English nurses and I went dancing with the bushman. There was a young Argentinean woman who joined us. We spent the night dancing and telling stories, sharing beyond the language barrier.

It really did broaden my mind.

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Conversations about Rabbits

The smell of stifado alone warmed me up that winter evening. The onions that were stewing released an earthy tone reminiscent of the harvest smell in the plains. This was sweetened by the cinnamon and wine. The slow bubbling of the pot on top of the wood burning stove made the kitchen so inviting, warm beyond the invitation.

Kortsouli is a hill nearby the ancient ruins of Mantinea, in the plains of Tripolis. We always referred to the farm that Old Man Simbonis had there as just that, Kortsouli. When we were children my brother would spend time in the ruins before they were excavated and find arrow heads and other items from the war against the Athenians.

The building on the farm was medieval. Some of the ancient blocks of the walls of Mantinea were incorporated into the mud wall that formed the outer wall of sheds, stables and a simple summer home, when the old man would stay at Kortsouli if there was a harvest or birthing. The heavy wooden double doors, big enough to allow a horse cart through, faced Mantinea. On the right of the door was a pigeon loft, and next to that the rabbit hutch.

The rabbits faced the courtyard through old chicken mesh, with a handmade wooden frame hinged to allow entry.  One day a litter had been born, and somehow all three of us and some children from the village ended up at Kortsouli. Often one or two of us were there with the old man. Originally it would involve a donkey ride from the village house, but later he got a Zundapp motorcycle and we would ride pillion. My father used to walk there, and I still do not understand how we were allowed on the motorcycle when in South Africa we were not even allowed to look at them. My brother even had an accident once when the old man rode into the furrow along the narrow tarred road. My father trusted his life, and his children’s, with his best friend, George Simbonis.

I do not remember the day we played with the rabbits. I remember my favourite captain’s hat, but do not remember donning the rabbit as a prince would for some wedding. I think we adopted a rabbit each, and were allowed to play with them each time we were at Kortsouli. I remember the soft fur, the warm wet nuzzle against my palm. The heat and dust of the courtyard, reprieved by the shade of a mulberry tree just outside the gates, and another at the other corner, shading the well with cold dark water.

Many years later I remember eating the winter kitchen stifado and crying inside. Because the main ingredient of stifado is rabbit.