Grandfather Yiannis descended from the western part of mainland Greece; from a village called The Springs of Arta, best known amongst the locals by its slavic name Vrestenitsa -the place of elms, before modern Greece’s state annexation of Epirus effected the hellenization of many toponyms. The village was built on a small bucolic plateau east of the main bulk of the vast Tzoumerka mountains, under the Kokkinolakka peak, overlooking the river Achelous valley of outstanding beauty. A place too cumbersome to access, on foot or by the other transport means of the era, that is, donkeys or mules, so that one wonders how on earth people gathered a collective strength and will, and found the courage and the resources to climb these mountains, and made this habitat, perched amongst gigantic mountain peaks, viable and lived lives for generations.
Of course, they might have fled
up there at a crossroads of history, persecuted by ominous conquering hordes; or
their ascend might have been forced by brutal monarchs or
avaricious plutocrats, who seized by force the fertile plain that expands from
the foothills to the Ionian Sea shores, for the appropriation of wealth and the
accumulation of power -those eternal lusts of humans. Hundreds of the oppressed
souls of the region perished heroically and marked the history of the place. Not far
upslope from the village, brothers Kitsos and
Notis of the Botsaris clan, along with the heroic inhabitants of the legendary Souli,
besieged in the Monastery of Seltsos, bravely resisted for weeks the Arvanites of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, until they
were eventually overwhelmed; only a handful amongst them managed to find escape
routes and survive the onslaught. Their women and children, as the legend goes, danced
their way to the edge of the cliff of Zalongo before throwing themselves
off it into the gorge below to avoid capture.
Perhaps, it was the imposing mountains
and their unreachable peaks, the forests and the streams, the mystical life above
the clouds, the starry firmament of the pitch-black nights, the closeness to
their gods, all those elements that exert an irresistible spiritual attraction.
Or, for a few, it might have been the solitude one could find there in
abundance, far away from the hustle and bustle of the town of Arta at the
foothills of Tzoumerka. For myself and many of my contemporaries, the place had
been a terra incognita, my unique link, rusty from the passage of time, being that
it was the birthplace of my maternal grandfather, Mr. Yiannis, the primary
school teacher.
Only once, did I try to climb
the slopes of the Tzoumerka mountains by car in search of my grandfather's
village and for a glimpse at my family’s heritage. It was a late spring morning,
when we began our journey from Arta the largest town in the foothills. The
orange orchards in the plain were sleeping under a warm sunshine, dressed in
the white of their blossoms; the slopes of the mountains dark green against of the
gray ridges, and the bright blue skies beyond. The road was narrow, poorly constructed,
asphalted before times immemorial, with endless u-shaped turns, under a dense
vegetation of oaks, elms, and beeches. A few fir trees were sparsely scattered
on the huge bare rocks that rose above us. The exhausting uphill drive under
the canopy, through just a few glades in the luxuriant vegetation, was abruptly
interrupted by steep descents down to small ravines warn by crystal-clear water.
These were inevitably followed by virtually vertical ascents that seemed to end
up at the top of cliffs above us, yet never reaching them. A rare sample of
life on our way, a shepherd with his flock of sheep on a plateau, scrutinized
in wonder the unexpected visitors. At the end, the seemingly endless ascent through
the wilderness frustrated us and we abandoned our trip a few kilometres before
reaching our intended destination. It was the
nearest to my grandfather's birthplace, where a vital branch of my family was
attached to the trunk of our genealogical tree. With my friend Anna next to me,
we had other things in mind and not much time at our disposal. It was one of
those micro-existentialist decisions, however, that I regretted in
retrospect.
Then again, I had been
thinking… the people of that seemingly oneiric place might have had their the lucid
sunny days, their limpid water springs, their cool and crispy air of the
mountain tops, their trees and lucid sky, their pitch-black silent nights, broken
only by the rustle of the leaves, the songs of birds, the cries of animals or aeolian
sounds, the moon looming and the stars, through the starry firmament, twinkling
bright like nowhere else in the grand cities of civilization; the place and the
landscape belonged to them -absolutely. Yet, they lived difficult lives of
daily struggles. The beauty of cosmos around them falls, through habit, into
the background of the daily grind. Before the naturalists and the tourists, those
specimens of human existence, which evolved through the emergence of the
bourgeoisie and the explosion of urbanization, in a period when grandfather was
still a small child, this daily struggle withered their lives. Eventually, the
materialistic progress spilled over and as far as those remote geographical margins.
Some of the shocks of the industrial revolution have been felt all the way up
to the mountains of Epirus and its people. The sirens of a breathless progress
approaching and spreading could hardly be resisted, especially by the younger generation.
Whose young person defenses could resist the lure of a richer and more
comfortable life, materially and spiritually? Would one rather ride the train
of progress towards a better life, from a valid hypothesis based on ample
evidence and hitherto experience, or miss it and left stranded in a withering world
of constant and irrevocable decline?
When the clock of existence strikes
midnight, as it always happens everywhere and for everyone (and it happens with
mathematical brutality), the weight of sorrow, bitterness and repentance weighs
heavily on the heart of the mortals who did not seize the one or two
opportunities presented to them, and missed that train for another life, albeit
on the very same earth. Escapism and eventually migration from an asymmetrical and desperate poverty, from
the visibly intolerable chasm between life in grandfather’s village and the attractions of the civilisation at the foothills
and beyond was inevitable, unpreventable and to an extent predestined by the
laws of economic and social advance. And it occurred in a massive scale. Grandfather’s village deprived of its youth and vigor, languished,
deserted by its inhabitants, barring some of its old folk. Just as it happened
with most of the villages on the mountains of Epirus: stripped of human beings
and life, which scattered themselves in the metropoles of Greece, America,
Germany, Australia.
The fact that Mr. Yiannis'
father was a seminarian in the Springs of Arta and the small parish of the
surrounding villages and communities, which implied that he was one amongst the
very few literate persons in a sea of illiteracy, must have helped decisively: this
provided Yiannis with solid foundations, as they say, carved out a perspective,
opened a few wider avenues, amongst others more mundane. It is also possibly
that his priest-father supported him materially and morally, as well as other
practical ways conceivable, to escape from that dead-end everyday life and the
cultural isolation of the village. There were some relatives in Arta with
connections: a bridge to more distant places of even wider horizons. All these
factors must have coalesced, together with an equally significant personal
impulse and will, and led him far away –with a handwoven bag on his shoulders and
several kilometers of daily walking to the distant high school, to be educated:
to build up a different life in a completely different world from that of the Epirus
mountains.
A personal will and a right frame
of mind must have proved critical in Mr Yiannis’ development, evidence of this had been that he
abandoned, when still young, the god and the religion his father preached and served
–genuinely and with reverent sincerity, I imagine, whilst indoctrinating his
son and other local souls in his beliefs and dogma. We should point out,
however, that, barring a few exceptions, an individual’s will and initiative,
personal gifts, talent, and charismas, do not always prove sufficient conditions
for major social leaps and life transformations. Even those personal, doubtlessly
valuable, traits, are molded by the environment and reinforced by tailwinds
(or, as it may happen, weakened, or diverted by headwinds): the priest father
who knew how to read and write amidst an ocean of illiteracy around him and kept
a small theological library at home, some more cultured relatives in the town below
with political connections. At the same time, there are innumerable circumstances
and infinitesimal forces, often acting imperceptibly or unconsciously in the
background of our existence, unaccounted for, whose resultant may push a man in
one direction at one stage or pull him in another at the next one. Always, as
someone said, the customs and traditions of previous generations "weigh
like a nightmare" on the consciousness of young people, along with numerous
regressive or progressive factors along the way: sometimes insurmountable
obstacles, sometimes wide, free avenues to follow, not at one’s behest or of one’s
choice, and which might never have occurred to them that they would encounter. A
few manage and overcome these obstacles and survive, better their lives, even prosper,
the weakest may crumple under their weight.
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