Keep The Shiny Side Up

Keep The Shiny Side Up is the motto of us knights of the road. It means keeping the bike upright. Not so easy. I fall off. I have near misses. It has never been anyone else's fault. I'm not a good driver. Sometimes I am admiring the scenery or myself in the mirror or a leggy girl on the pillion of a fellow knight or otherwise not paying proper attention, so I go into a ditch or the back of a parked car or a pothole. Fortunately I have not yet tumbled into the path of a moving vehicle or broken a bone. I have escaped with bruises, cuts, grazes and quiet evenings at home picking gravel out of my skin with tweezers. 

The reward is to feel in touch with the world, senses heightened not dulled in the isolation bubble of a car. I take three times longer to get anywhere but feel I've done something worthwhile. There doesn't need to be much of a view. A bird, a tree, the grass at the side of the road, brought to life by the breeze of going past, give a sense of witnessing something. And by witnessing the world I witness myself.

A lot of the time I watch the tarmac for potholes, debris and roadkill but even this can be enthralling on different shades and patterns of grey, like travelling along an unending abstract painting. I am a connoisseur of road surfaces and get a thrill when they are unusual or beautiful. I once went out of my way to follow a tractor pulling a trailer-full of fresh slaughtered sheep because of the blood-red splashes in the white dust. I recently lay on the asphalt with Harley pinning down my left leg, entranced by the close-up of pearly gravel scattered in mother-of-pearly oil glistening in the sunlight. Aesthetic enjoyment may have had something to do with the elation of not being dead but this is true of many pleasures.

A hazard on the back roads is tortoises. I have yet to see one among the road kill. Perhaps it is because they are not built for darting out in front of you. There is plenty of time to see them, like rocks in the middle of the road. Another possibility is that they sleep at night, when most road killing happens. The hazard is more for drivers, who brake, pull over, get out to carry the tortoise out of danger and are hit by passing vehicles. I like to enhance the tortoise’s flight, soaring up and plummeting down, banking and weaving, making aeroplane noises. The aerophobic shrink into their shells, others crane their necks to enjoy the view or paddle their legs under the illusion that they are responsible. Or dreaming. Or a shaman among tortoises. 

It seems odd that the tortoise is one of the symbols of speedy Hermes in sun hat and seven league sandals, the messenger of the gods. The reason is that he invented the lyre with a tortoiseshell as the soundbox, the first bouzouki.

Pagan Mount Athos

  

The Athos peninsula is about 50km long and 10km wide. A central spine of mountain ridge runs down the middle and rises to the peak at the southern tip. Water courses, ravines, and valleys run down like ribs on either side. In the west and on plateaux there is cultivable land while the rest is thick forest, home to boar, foxes, jackals, wolves, reptiles, and birds. 

Paths follow the spine, the valleys down to the sea, and the perimeter shore. People walked them long before the first monks arrived. In the middle of the fifth century BC Herodotus wrote in his, and up to then the only, history book that Athos was a great and famous mountain with cities prosperous enough pay tribute to Athens, which had built an empire on the strength of defeating the Persians.

Settlements included temples to Artemis on the site of Great Lavra monastery and to her brother Apollo on the site of present-day Ierissos. The summit of the mountain had a shrine to Zeus. It was also a signalling beacon, part of a system that could send messages throughout Anatolia and Greece. In his play Agamemnon Aeschylus describes how news of the fall of Troy was relayed by fire and smoke from nearby Mount Ida to Athos and onwards via the mountaintops to Mycenae in Argos where Clytemnestra was preparing to kill him in the bath.

Athos was populated by Greeks until the 6th century CE when it was devastated by plague and Slav invasion. In the 9th century the Byzantines reoccupied the peninsula, bringing in Greeks and Armenians from Asia Minor. In the 10th century the first monks built monasteries on the ruins of the old temples and opened up the same paths that served them a thousand years before. Some of the paved paths survive, called as Kalderimi, from the Turkish kaldırım, a pavement (built). The cobbles and stone slabs are probably the oldest monuments on Athos.

There are other traces of a rich pagan past. High up in the wall of the courtyard of Koutloumousiou, near the main gate, is an ancient grave stele, a tombstone with the bas-relief of a seated woman dipping into a jewellery box held by her maid standing in front of her: a common domestic scene showing the status of the dead woman. It dates from around the middle of the fourth century BC. What are two pagan women doing inside the monastery? Hard to say, unless they were thought to represent some biblical scene. But they point to the probability that Karyes was a thriving settlement. Several other monasteries have traces of a pre-Christian past in the form of sculptures, sarcophagi, and walls. Outside the refectory of the Great Lavra the porch is supported by ancient columns turned upside-down to counter their malevolent influence. 

Since the early Fathers of the Christian church, theologians and historians were hostile to pagan religion, seeing in it the material validation of sins, vices, and passions. At the same time they acknowledged the heritage of language, philosophy, and arts, ideas and imagery they received from their predecessors. In the murals of some monasteries pre-Christian celebrities are co-opted into the Christian narrative. The porch of Vatopedi’s main gate is adorned with Greek philosophers and the Erythraean Sibyl who foretold the coming of Christ. In the refectory of Great Lavra Alexander the Great is drafted in to defeat the Persian Darius, foretelling the battle between Christianity and Islam. 

The Byzantine artist of the murals in the church of Dochiariou goes further, showing Alexander ascending into Heaven and in pomp with the Emperor Augustus, Nebuchadnezzar, and Darius.

Under the gables of the entrance to the refectory of Great Lavra the celebrated fresco painter Theophanes the Cretan depicted the Annunciation in about 1540. The Angel Gabriel on the left announces the ‘Logos’, the ‘Word’ to Mary on the right. Between them is an ancient Greek plaque with a votive inscription and a huge human ear in high relief. The inscription reads, ‘Neuris offered this to Artemis Agrotera (the Wild-One).’ It has been dated to the fifth century BC. The ear has been co-opted into the scene because it was thought to be the organ through which the Virgin received the Logos by which she conceived.  And who is that slinking away in the extreme right of the scene, with no halo, tell-tale red hair and distaff? Artemis. 

Wine for the King of England

The museum of Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos has manuscripts, icons, crucifixes and many other priceless treasures of the last thousand years. Among them is a pink and green tin that contained a slice of the wedding cake of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. It is empty as the abbot ate the cake. Prince Charles has been coming on private visits to Athos for many years. He is a celebrity among the monks and not just those of Vatopedi, as we discovered when four of us were billeted at a smaller monastery as part of the annual path-clearing project of the Friends of Mount Athos.

Father George was a useful man to know as he was the cellar master. One evening in the cool of his cellar we sat around a table among massive barrels with a tin of smoked fish and a jug of decent red from a demi-john the gift of a Transylvanian well-wisher, in thanks for a successful intercession to the Virgin, whose icon is a treasure of the monastery. We did not suspect that he harboured a special mission for us.

“You must know that Saint George comes in person to the abbot once or twice a year to see how he is getting on.”

“Very considerate of him.”

“Of course. Two years ago Saint George visited the abbot and said he must make wine for King Charles of England. You know Saint George loves England too,” said Father George.

“Oh yes. His flag is everywhere.”

“On churches.”

“On football shirts.”

“But he is Prince Charles. Not King.”

“A great country must have a King,” said Father George.

“We have a Queen.”

“Of course but that is a woman. The ruler should be a man. Byzantium had two emperors. England can have a King and a Queen.”

“Fair enough.”

“The abbot gave me the blessing to help him make the wine for King Charles as I am in charge of the cellar. We had a novice to help us. The three of us picked the best grapes with our hands. We pressed it down here. See, there is the press. And there is the barrel. It is ready now. It is organic for the health of the King.”

“Do you use sulfites? Or do you rack it?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Father George.

How do you stop the fermentation?”

“Of course when wine gets to fourteen degrees it kills all the bacteria and the fermentation stops. You must taste.”

Father George picked up a glass jug, rinsed it under the tap and took it over to a 100 litre wooden cask lying on its side with a crown chalked on the front. It had been tapped and Father George turned the spigot. This was not going to be pleasant. I have experience of wine-making. With my friend Panayis we made 5-600 litres a year in my cellar in South London with grapes from Covent Garden Market. I suspected this would be strong as sherry and tasting of dead mouse with hints of camel urine and fartleberry. Father George filled our glasses and invited us with a flourish to sup the royal brew. After sniffing, holding up to the light, a loyal toast to Charles, England and Saint George, anything to put off the moment of truth, we steeled ourselves not to pucker and sipped the littlest of sips. Then swigged. Swigged again. Held out our glasses for more. It was excellent.

“You must take it to the King,” said Father George.

“How, Father? How do we get that barrel to London? Through the customs of several countries? We can’t take it on a plane. You need a shipping company.”

“We have tried. They will not take it. It is not certified. You must help us. The abbot is most anxious. What will he say to Saint George? Take some bottles.”

“We can’t turn up at King Charles’s palace with bottles of home-made wine. Monastery made, I mean. They have security. They’ll want to know what’s in it.”

“Of course. Wicked people wish to poison the King. That is normal. We will send a letter with the seal of the abbot. When the butler opens the door of the palace you will give the wine to him and he will taste it before he gives it to the King.”

He looked so expectant, so imploring. He was under pressure from his boss and his boss’s boss, Saint George.

“We can take two bottles each. That’s all we are allowed.”

Relief and happiness flooded over Father George’s face. He chose eight dark green bottles from a bin of empties and gave them a good rinse. He opened a new packet of corks and dragged out a floor-standing corker. We gathered round the spigot and filled the bottles, with hearty tastes to make sure the quality was consistent. Each of us had a turn corking two bottles and took photos to prove it. Father George found a roll of yellow masking tape and a felt-tip to make labels that he wrote out in elegant ecclesiastical script. Finally we tore up cardboard boxes for packaging that we sealed with the tape. 

Two months later three of us turned up at Clarence House, Prince Charles’s official residence, to deliver the wine to his private office. They were kindly received by some very senior staff and a letter of thanks signed by His Royal Highness was sent to the abbot. I hope somebody got to drink the wine. It was rather good. 

Into The Tomb

One of Evia’s most ancient monuments, a Bronze Age Mycenaean beehive tomb, is half an hour from our house. It’s outside the village of Katakalos beside a dirt road skirting a valley. 

There are no signs, fences, information boards, just two rusty metal poles on the side of the road.

The Mycenaean civilisation flourished three and a half thousand years ago. It takes its name from the city of Mycenae on the mainland of southern Greece, famous for its king Agamemnon, who led the Greeks in the war against Troy and was murdered in the bath by his wife Clytemnestra when he got home.

The Evian tomb is a smaller version of the cavernous one in Mycenae but still the genuine article, a bronze age relic from the age of Odysseus on our doorstep.

After half a day of searching on Harley, my old and trusty motorbike, I find the entrance. I’d driven past it twice thinking it was a sheep pen. A wicket gate guards a tunnel into the hillside. Undo a couple of turns of wire, stoop, and by the light of my phone creep into the musty dark.

After half a day of searching on Harley, my old and trusty motorbike, I find the entrance. I’d driven past it twice thinking it was a sheep pen. A wicket gate guards a tunnel into the hillside. Undo a couple of turns of wire, stoop, and by the light of my phone creep into the musty dark. 

After twenty feet or so it opens up into a stone clad beehive chamber fifteen feet wide and fifteen tall at its apex. It’s shored up with beams inside to stop it falling in. 

A storm of bats fans my face and ruffles my hair. I drop the phone, lens down, and scrabble in the dark and bat guano. Homer sings in the Odyssey about gibbering souls of the dead like bats sped by Hermes into hell. I see what he means as I flee the realm of death into the day. 

I wipe bat shit off my phone on the grass and look over a rumpled landscape of olive orchards to a gleam of sea. People who once stood here might have watched Homer’s Greek fleet cruising up the gulf on its way to Troy. Or imagined it. As I do.

A Rough Guide to Setines (aka Athens)

Nicola Martoni, a little, short-sighted, middle aged provincial lawyer from Southern Italy, arrived in mainland Greece in February 1395. He had been on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and was struggling to get home to Carinola, a small town 60 kilometres north of Naples. He spent two days in Setines, some of which he spent seeing the sights. His diary contains the earliest medieval description we have of the city. 

Setines was one of the names for Athens coined by the ruling Franks, the medieval name in the eastern Mediterranean for western Europeans. It is a contraction of εις Αθήνα - eis Athena - in or at Athens. (The name Istanbul has a similar origin, ‘eis stin poli’, in the city.)

The history of Frankish Setines began in 1204 when the valiant knights of the Fourth Crusade gave up on the Holy Land and sacked Constantinople. They replaced the Byzantine emperor with a Catholic one of their own. The land grab that followed resulted in several competing principalities within the new Latin Empire. The Burgundian knight Otto de la Roche was granted Attica and Boeotia to create the Duchy of Athens. 

Otto set about replicating the western European feudality he had grown up with. Latins were the lords. Greeks were the serfs. They had no right to own, sell, buy, leave or inherit property. They were not allowed to hold military or public office. The Orthodox archbishop was banished. Greeks could practise their religion but the clergy answered to a Catholic archbishop supported by an influx of Cistercian monks. The official languages were French and Latin.

Acropolis with the Frankish Tower
James 'Athenian' Stuart 1782

If Greeks thought the French were oppressive, worse was to come. In 1311 the Great Catalan Company of mercenaries defeated the Burgundians and made the Duchy of Athens their home for the next forty-five years. The official language was changed to Catalan. In 1388, seven years before Martoni arrived, Nerio Acciaiuoli, from a Florentine banking family, captured Athens from the Catalans. To win the support of his Orthodox subjects and Byzantine neighbours he changed the official language back to Greek, employing Greek scribes and officials. He learned Greek, took a Greek mistress and appointed Greeks as ‘elders’ to advise on government. An Orthodox Archbishop was allowed back into the city for the first time since 1204, although he had to make do with a church in the lower town as the Parthenon church remained Catholic.

Nerio died in in September 1394, the year before Martoni arrived. He bequeathed Athens and its revenues to the Parthenon church to replace riches he had looted from it and to employ twenty priests to pray for his soul. The Orthodox Archbishop, incensed that Athens was now the property of the Catholic clergy, invited Turks into the lower town. Besieged on the Acropolis the Florentine governor appealed for help to the Venetians of Negropont, the name given to the island of Euboea and its capital. They sent an army to evict the Turks and took over the city.

This was the situation when Martoni arrived in Attica. He travelled by night to avoid bands of Italians, Catalans, Turks, Albanians and unaffiliated brigands. But the city was peaceful under its Venetian garrison and he took the opportunity for a spot of sightseeing. From the evidence of the stone blocks and columns lying around, his first impression is that Athens must have been a great city at the time of the Emperor Hadrian. Then it was destroyed by the Trojans and reduced to the area around the castle. Trojans? Later he describes a relic from Homeric Troy so he may have mixed up his historical periods, not for the first time. Or he was using Trojan as one of the popular names of the time for Turks and other invaders from the east. The actual culprits were the Heruli, a Germanic tribe from the Black Sea, who destroyed the city in AD 267.

After settling in he asks some locals to show him round. They take him to ‘Aristotle’s School’, passing two handsome fountains where students imbibed wisdom with the water. His guides conjured the school out of the ruins. It is built of marble, twenty feet long and sixteen feet wide. It was roofed with marble architraves and entablatures above them. The whole building around and overhead was decorated with various reliefs in gold and other beautiful colours. Traces of decoration can be seen at both ends of the room. Outside the door are porticos with columns supporting marble architraves and entablatures, sculpted and painted in gold, where Aristotle used to stroll to relax when he was tired of studying.

A stroll in the cloisters is a faded memory of the Peripatetics. What they are in fact admiring is the remains of the reservoir at the end of the Hadrian’s aqueduct. It is now the ‘Dexamini’ in Kolonaki at the foot of Mount Lycabettos, where water is blessed on January 6. The actual Lyceum was destroyed by the Romans in 86 BCE.

Our tourist follows his guides to the imposing palace of the Emperor Hadrian, where he miscounts the twenty remaining columns and their architraves. Hadrian certainly dedicated it and doubtless admired the several statues of himself. As Martoni pictures the great emperor sitting in state he is not to know it was the Temple of the Olympian Zeus, left in ruins by the Heruli and a handy source of marble for their successors. 

A couple of minutes walk away is Hadrian’s Arch. Martoni compares it with the entrance to the tower of Capua, his provincial capital. It is not as high but nevertheless impressive. The Panathenaic Stadium he takes to be a Field of Mars, where soldiers from the nearby barracks trained for battle. Echoes may have come down of gladiatorial contests from Roman times.

Walled-up Propylaea 1770

The high point of the tour is the Castro. The wide Roman steps up to the Propylaea and the great gateway through which the Panathenaic procession passed are closed off. The way in is along a narrow path to the east of the Nike bastion near the modern entrance. He peeks inside the walled-off Propylaea, now the great hall of the Ducal Palace, and admires the columns and massive architraves. 

He is more amazed  at the sixty columns of the Parthenon, higher, would you believe, than ladders used for harvest at home in Carinola. Saint Dionysius the Areopagite was chained to one of them during the Passion of Christ. When all the buildings of the world shook in the resulting earthquake he realised either the world is coming to an end or the Son of God will suffer, and traced the sign of the cross on the marble with his fingers, where it was still to be seen. This is the tour guide’s version of the story in the Acts of the Apostles in which Dionysius was overawed in Egypt by a solar eclipse on the first Good Friday. It was another fifty years before he was converted to the cross by Saint Paul. By then he was a judge in the court of the Areopagus - hence his sobriquet.

Inside the temple is the church of Saint Mary, as large as the church in Capua. The massive entrance doors were salvaged from the ruins of Troy when it was destroyed by the Greeks. In the first of its two naves is the first altar in the world, made by Saint Dionysius after his conversion. The altar in the second nave has four massive jasper columns twelve feet high. In a crack in the wall is a light that never goes out, believed to be a saint’s last resting place. Kill-joy seventeenth century travellers reported that it was a translucent stone set in the masonry. In a side chapel is a painting of Our Lady made from life by Saint Luke. Another priceless treasure is a book of all the gospels written in Greek in Saint Helena of Constantinople’s own hand. 

The custodians show them a collection of saintly body parts including an arm bone of Saint Denis of France. What is it doing here? Since the ninth century Dionysius and Denis have been confused, sharing the story of their martyrdoms. Dionysius was thought to have gone to Rome where he was beheaded under Diocletian, the same fate as befell Denis. He/they continued preaching, carrying around their head(s). Although the conflation was disproved as early as the sixteenth century and they are commemorated separately by Orthodox and Catholics, it is still promoted by online hagiographies.

Finally Martoni tells us about two great columns said to have supported a marvellous shrine containing a statue so powerful that, in those days, if enemy vessels approached, however far out to sea they appeared, the statue sank them. But if they were well-intentioned the statue did them no harm. There are memories here of the great statue of Athena Prómachos, Athena Leading the Troops, that stood between the Propylea and the Parthenon and could be seen far out to sea. The columns were in fact part of a Roman monument to a father and son, who paid for a civic celebration.

We can smile at Martoni’s credulity and the tour guide’s perennial love of a good story. The main sources of information for most people before printing was the Bible, word-of-mouth, tales and ballads. With little else to go on, misapprehension and confusion is understandable. For example, Martoni sailed upriver from Alexandria to Babylon, the Coptic twin city of Cairo. So he tells us the river is the Tigris. 

Martoni travels through a ‘real’ world of physical exertion, trial and mortal danger.  It is also a world of the imagination that to him is equally as ‘real’. His text makes little distinction between the natural and the supernatural. What appears to us as his gullibility, his credulity, is acceptance of the everyday marvellous. The stone glowing with saintly remains in the Parthenon church? The gates of Troy? The laser-eyed statue? When you have venerated the balsam trees sprung up for Baby Jesus’s smalls to dry on in the Matarea Garden of Cairo or the cross of the Good Thief hovering unsupported in mid-air in its chapel on Cyprus, you take smaller wonders in your stride.

Florentine image of Athens

Some stories have classical roots. Landing in Attica Martoni sees two marble statues of a man and a woman. It is said that he used to be a real man who pursued the woman in order to take her virginity. She fled into the hills, refusing to let him have his way. Seeing she could not escape him, she begged God to turn both of them into marble statues. Her prayer was heard and so they remain to this day.  Arthurian Romance also brought the landscape to life with knightly deeds of derring-do, damsels and dragons. Athenians would have been familiar with Italian ‘cantari’ and similar ballads in Catalan and Greek. Tales feature the first Duke of Athens, Theseus, and his lovely Amazon bride Hippolyta, or Cecrops the founder of the city. 

Dodging Turks and Albanians, Martoni left Setines for Negropont, where he hoped to find a Venetian ship to take him home. He admired the enchanted castle in the middle of the Euripos defended by currents flowing both ways at once, where the enchantress Morgan le Fay imprisoned Sir Gawain for confessing his fling with her dragon-daughter, Ponzella Gaia, to Guinevere. He waited six weeks before coming back to Setines. He has no more to say about Athens, except that he had to cadge a bed in the archbishop’s house as the inns were full. He ran the nocturnal gauntlet of brigandage again by mule and boat to Corinth, held by the Duke of Cephalonia, where he climbed up to Acrocorinth by night to evade Byzantine besiegers. After more adventures he got home via Patras, Corfu and Venice. 

Seven years later in 1402 Antonio, the disinherited son of the late Florentine Duke Nerio, regrouped his forces and evicted the Venetians. Supported by Ottomans, his dynasty held Setines until 1460 when they bowed to the inevitable and surrendered its stories to the Turks, who reverted to the more classical Atina.

This appeared in Argo, A Hellenic Review, Autumn 2020

Gardening on Mount Athos

Here’s a gardening tip from a monk I met on Mount Athos.

“One. The most important is to put an icon of Saint Trifon in the garden and give him a really good feast day. Two. Rely on God - if one crop is bad he gives you more of something else. Three. Weed by hand and pick off the pests.”

There you have it. Trifon is the third century patron saint of gardeners and wine-growers.

On a map of Greece you will see in the north what looks like a stunted hand with three fingers sticking out into the sea. The top finger is the peninsula of Mount Athos. The ‘Autonomous Monastic State of the Holy Mountain’ is a self-governing state within the Republic of Greece. It has been famous as the spiritual home of Orthodoxy for a thousand years. 

A spine of mountain ridge fifty kilometres long and ten kilometres wide rises to the bare summit of the Holy Mountain before plunging down to the sea. Water courses, ravines and valleys run down like ribs on either side. In the west and on plateaus, clearings and terraces is land for farming. The rest is a wild place, bare mountain or thick forest, a source of food to forage and home to boar, foxes, jackals, wolves, reptiles and birds.

About half of the 1800 monks live in twenty monasteries and the rest in smaller communities and hermitages. They come from all over the world, primarily Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Russia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. The community is glibly described as a throwback to medieval Byzantium. Wonder-working icons and relics are channels to the divine; everyday miracles are part of nature; the marvellous deeds of saints are facts not metaphors.Their faith, their way of life, the strange beauty of the place, promise mystery in the ancient sense of truth beyond comprehension. 

They are all men. Many women bridle that half the human race is banned from seeing the wonderful sights and treasures, which I have now learned not to bang on about in their presence. I have also learned not to mansplain the ban’s history. The simplest explanation is that in a monastery there is an ‘enclosure’ where women may not go, and in a convent where men may not go. Think of Athos as a big enclosure.

Monasteries have a basic layout. Inside a ring of walls is a stone tower with the treasury and the library, the last refuge against enemies and fire. The focal point is the katholikon, the church, repository of icons and relics. Close by are the refectory and kitchen. In the courtyard a fountain spouts mountain water. The living quarters are in three or four storey buildings with single cells for monks and dormitories for pilgrims. Other rooms house chapels, meeting rooms, laundry, and workshops. Underground is Saint Trifon’s other realm, the wine cellar. Outside the walls are vineyards, orchards and kitchen gardens. Cliff-top monasteries have flamenco skirts of cultivated terraces.

Beyond the cultivated fields thick forest clads all but the highest and most precipitous slopes of the mountain. Monks do not eat meat and female animals are banned, with the exception of cats to keep down the mice and hens to give eggs for high days and tempera for icon painting. So the landscape is free from the flocks of sheep and goats which have scoured hillsides in the rest of the Mediterranean of vegetation and soil. On the secular side of the frontier of Athos the hills are stripped to grey rock and scrub by grazing. On the theocratic side, green hills flourish. 

At the beginning of the last century there were up to 10,000 monks. Their numbers shrank until the 1960’s. The land they cultivated has been taken over by trees, so that in the middle of the forest one comes across old orchards of olive and other fruit trees gone wild but still a bounty for a foraging hermit.

Athos is often called the Garden of the Virgin - To Perivoli Tis Panaghias. There are two Greek words for garden. Kipos is the land round the house decorated with flowerbeds and shady places for a barbie. Perivoli is a more utilitarian plot away from the house for growing food, like an allotment. There may be a few flowers in pots and beds around the monastery courtyard but not for decoration. A committed ascetic would avoid taking pleasure in them for their own sake but see them as another way of honouring the Virgin. 

The primary purpose of gardening on Athos is growing things to eat. The word monk comes from the Greek monachos, meaning solitary. The basic unit is a hermit. When he finds a lonely place to spend his life he first plants onions and then a vine. He takes stale bread from his monastery and forages in the forest for weeds, nuts, berries and mushrooms. This is all you should eat if you want to be skinny and ninety, plus the odd apple. On a monastery table at every meal is an eremitical onion for a side dish or dessert. 

Fortunately for us non-hermits the Athos diet and the horticulture that furnishes it are more varied. Fields and terraces are hatched with lines of leeks, celery, chard, beans, onions, kale, spinach, huge blue cabbages and more, or wrapped in shimmering polytunnels forcing peppers, aubergines, courgettes and tomatoes. Stunted vines squat on wire trellises. Regiments of orange, lemon, persimmon, pomegranate, fig, cherry, apple and olive trees muster in ranks. Walls and chainlink fences keep out marauding wild pigs. Beehives provide superb honey. There is space for wheat. This has always been imported.

At the monastery of Konstamonitou tending the flower beds around the katholikon is clearly not on the roster of duties allocated by the abbot. Non-Orthodox  are not allowed into church for services so for something to do during vespers I earned my keep by tidying up the planters around the church. With my Opinel knife I deadheaded roses, rooted out bindweed, pruned shrubs. I gave it all a good watering from the fountain. It was pleasant work in the late afternoon sunshine, listening to the chanting from an open church window. A bird in the eves joined in with an exquisite, blackbirdish song, all full of life and praise to touch the heart of an old sceptic. I got an infected finger from a thorn, which I thought was a bit churlish of whoever doles out just deserts. 

Our Greek Garden

High summer. We love to sit in the garden under the mulberry tree. 

Forty years ago we bought a tumbledown goat shed and mule stable in a deserted hillside hamlet on the island of  Evia. A typical Albanian house, rough stone walls and a slate roof, three single room family dwellings in a row. The idea was to do it up like it used to be, no electricity or running water, oil lamps and a well, the simple life as it was lived for generations. A toilet was the only concession to modernity. We had a similar philosophy towards the garden at the back, to leave it as it might have looked a hundred years before, barely distinguishable from the rest of the hillside.

‘Garden’ flatters our little patch of wild-grassed mountain turned golden in the summer’s drought. The mulberry tree was planted sixty years ago by the father of the last child born in the house. It has pink mulberries and I have just eaten a few. They taste sweetish and bland, no tang of acidity, a fruit for an invalid diet. The tree is noisy with chirpy little birds looking like the wren on the coin I took to the sweet shop for a farthing chew seventy years ago. Bigger birds grub around on the ground wagging their tails so I hazard a guess they are wagtails. Other birds in the tree are black but I don't know if they are technically blackbirds. They squabble in pairs. They all come for the mulberries or the insects that come for the mulberries. A score of butterflies, white, yellow, brown, red, scarlet, flutter round the fruit above me and are picked off on the wing by darting black and white jobs. The Greek for butterfly is the charming petalouda, little flying thing, which sounds as if it means flying flower. They compensate for the paucity of the earthbound variety. 

I sometimes think I should get a book and find out the names of the birds. Our Greek neighbours are little help. They classify birds according to whether you can eat them. Flocks of pretty slender things fly past, caramel and cream with a harsh, skittering call, doves I think. A rowdy magpie sits on the roof. I can just make out a stork's nest on the bell tower of the village church down in the valley. They feed on frogs from nearby Lake Dystos, an assumption based on Aesop's fables. The predatory lord of the birds, a fat buzzard, wheels high over us all. 

A village cat stalks a cricket in the grass. A pretty little weasel runs along the boundary wall, a red-brown body creamy white underneath. It comes to share the drips from our leaking water tank with birds and wasps. I wish it would make a nest on the premises as they are partial to snakes and mice.

There is a second little mulberry tree, a runt I planted in the wrong place. There must be solid bedrock underneath so it can't get to water. Thin, stunted, bent by the wind, it doesn't bear mulberries and has trouble making leaves. I don't have the heart to put it down. We have two olives and an almond. This denotes both the number of trees and the number of fruit they produce. The fig beside the house compensates with abundance in August. Oh the decadence of waking up, sticking a hand out of the window, plucking a sun-warmed fig and eating it in bed. A dishevelled cypress completes the arboretum.

In our neglectful hands perennials become annuals, annuals become seasonals. The shrubs and flowers still with us have survived careless planting, random pruning, overwatering when we’re here and drought when we’re not. Lavender, thyme, oregano, sage, oleander, geraniums, iris, and a couple of other very pretty, delicate things smelling of garlic, whose name I can never remember, thrive on neglect, exposure, drought, flood, sun and snow, as do the bully weeds and spiky grass covering most of the patch. I whack them at Easter, making a golden carpet to set off the colours of the rest of the stuff until next spring when it comes back luscious green with bright flowers. 

Let’s not forget the annoying things. Steely burrs and thorns in the grass, big yellow wasps, stingy little wasps living in the oregano flowers, the hornets' nest over the back window, biting ants and spiders, poisonous centipedes, called forty feet in Greek, tickly flies, mosquitoes, snakes, mice, rats. 

You get peace but not much quiet in the garden. Along with bird chirruping there's sheep bleating, bell clanking, bee humming, wasp buzzing, hornet droning, fly whining, leaf rustling, cicada tymbaling, and the church clock striking seven when it means nine. At least it's on the hour this year. Last year it chimed when it felt like it. On Saturday evening and Sunday morning a different bell calls us to church, bi-dong bi-dong bi-dong / bi-dong bi-dong bi-dong / bi-dong bi-dong bi-dong bi-dong bi-dong bi-dong bi-dong. A shepherdess passes by calling her sheep. Picture if you will Bo-peep or a Fragonard Amaryllis. Then reverse the image. An old lady in thick support stockings, corset outside her black dress, leaning on a staff, chivvying her sheep in a gruff troll's bellow. On weekdays at three o'clock the marble quarry on the shores of Dystos signals the end of the working day with a booming explosion as they prepare for tomorrow with dynamite. If the jets from the Skyros airforce base are patrolling at the same time it sounds like war. 

We are in a cicada boom this year. They make a tremendous din. Ancient Greeks and Romans thought their noise was melodious, and so it is, compared with tinnitus or bagpipes. They produce it by vibrating a sound box called a ‘tymbal’ or kettle drum. Swarms take off from trees as you walk past, spattering you with their pee, sap from the bark of trees they feed on. It tastes vaguely vegetal and is more pure than rain. Aristotle, a cicadic gastronome, thought the females were tastiest when they were full of eggs and the grubs even tastier. If they are not scoffed by philosophers the females lay their eggs in the bark of trees. They hatch and the grubs drop down into the soil where they burrow deep and feed on the sap of roots. After a year or two or more, up to seven, they burrow up again and climb trees or bushes or flower stalks or garden chairs, anything vertical. Metamorphosed into adults they take about twenty minutes to shed their skins. They spread their wings in the sun to dry and fly away, the males to add to the din and the females to admire them before choosing a mate. The sinister exoskeletons remain, still clinging to their perches. If you wake up in the night and find one crawling over your face it can give you a start but apart from that they are harmless to man or tree. 

In the evening at the time the French call entre chien et loup, between dog and wolf, a little Athenian owl perches on the chimney. Wolves haven't been round here for a hundred years or so. Entre mouche et moustique, between fly and mosquito, would be more topical. Or between bird and bat, which would preserve the alliteration in English. We occasionally find one upside down on a roof beam. This is the time to break out the ouzo and toast the setting sun in his splendour. Greek for set is vasilevi, to reign, an odd analogy for a dying light but understandable in its glorious thesaurus of red and gold. 

During the week the garden is quieter after nightfall. A bright moon casts tree shadows or in her absence a glittering sky sheds shooting stars. Athena’s owl coo-coos before the terminal shriek of its victim, mosquitoes whine, leaves rustle in the night breeze, unseen creatures slither and creep in the dry grass. At weekends these sounds are drowned by the amplified racket of weddings and baptisms in the village below.

We love to sit under the mulberry tree in this scruffy patch of hillside for the memories it bears of our family over the years; noisy breakfasts with the table biblically dripping with milk and honey; dinners under the stars with the smoke-sweet smell of mosquito coils and the hiss of a gas lamp; little children in pyjamas turning a grinning Easter lamb on his spit; ropes strung from the trees for swinging on and climbing up and falling off; racketing round and song and tears and laughter; flowers flown.

This appeared in the journal of the Mediterranean garden Society July 2020