Yesterday I walked to Loutra. It's a village about 1 km away from Skala Loutron, and it counts as 'large' compared to where I'm staying (i.e. it has two kafeneia, a corner shop, and a war memorial).
I set out at what's rapidly becoming my favourite part of the day on Lesvos: around 7 p.m., when the mountains turn blue, the sky softens pink where it meets the land, and the pinpoints of light begin to flick on across the bay in Perama. The bone-shaking heat had faded a little, leaving some cool air in the road. I followed the dusty track up through endless fields of olive trees, most of which probably dated from around 1909, when the hotel where I'm staying was still an olive oil factory. There are lots of little cats here, adult cats no bigger than kittens, tiny-boned and darting like light on water. I passed by goats, cows, sheep with thick-locked black fleece, and a magnificent chestnut horse.
Just as I reached Loutra, I met an old woman coming the other way. Her face was set in a severe expression, not angry but inward-looking, as if she was thinking over some pain which had happened long before my memory begins. She greeted me as we passed: για σου, the all-purpose remark, with a voice as firm as the tree-coated mountains around her. She strode off down the road, purposeful, and I resisted the temptation to watch her go.
There are still funeral στελοι in Greece today. Loutra has a small memorial to the village men who died in the Second World War. It's a large, upright rectangle of marble, with the figure of a woman in Egyptian semi-profile carved in bas-relief. She is wearing a headscarf and appears to be in her mid-forties, long-skirted, barefoot. Her expression is the same as the woman on the road, one of weary determination.
I was greeted again when I went out in search of the village shop today, by a man of about forty-five or fifty. I said Καλιμερα - 'good morning' - as we passed, and he stopped me in order to press my hand and say 'Very good!'
Brief encounters are benedictions in the thickets of linguistic struggle.
***
Before I came to Lesvos, I thought the island was small. Now, looking just at this one fold of a bay, tucked into the south-east coast, it amazes me that Sappho ever managed to move from Skala Eressou all the way across the spine of the island to Mytilini. This is a place of insularity, where very few people speak English, although the Greek spoken is standard Demotic; the notorious difficulty of ancient Lesbian-Aeolic seems to have left no trace in the modern dialect. I'm slowly getting used to modern standards of pronunciation: my tutor at the summer school has no use for the Erasmic system, so I had to learn to read Greek aloud all over again in the space of one hour. There seem to be no vowels except 'ee' and 'eh', and the consonants are truly bizarre ('mp' = 'b'? In what sensible phonological framework?!) Greek is lisped even harder than Spanish, has no infinitives and few participles, no aorist, no aspirated vowels.
I don't think we're in the Ioannou Centre anymore, Anaktoria.
***
We took a boat across the Gulf of Yera tonight for dinner in Perama. Dusk was falling over the bay, and as we pulled away into the water, the full moon emerged over the shoulders of the mountains. There is a church of the Panagia (Virgin Mary) at the top of a very high hill in Skala Loutron; they light candles along the goat-track road which meanders up from the village, either to guide lost souls to the light, or to prevent the creation of more lost souls from people falling off the cliff. (I know Bekah wants the low-down on Greek recipes, but I haven't been eating anything fancy; we've had so much fresh squid that my meals have looked like a Cthulhu family reunion for three days running.)
I wish I could form an encyclopedic view of this place: explain exactly how it is, how the heat gets inside you until your knees loosen, how after seeing the sunset once, you can understand forever why Sappho's favourite adjective was ποικιλασση - fine-tinted, iridescent, glittering. It's tempting to think that very little has changed since the time of the Tenth Muse, but when she was alive, the Persian Wars hadn't even started yet. Small things have happened in between: the Roman Empire, Christianity, Islam, things like that. Yet the paths we trace across the water were familiar to her, too:
Don't ask me what to wear, Cleis.
I have no embroidered headband from Sardis to give you,
such as I wore...
There is still a Turkish presence in the island. As we stepped off the puttering motorboat, back from dinner long after night had fallen, there was a group of men huddled together at the small stone quay. They bowed low as we gathered on solid ground, but their eyes were fixed on something higher: there were prayer mats waiting under their knees, and as we dispersed to the hotel, we could hear the swooping chant of evening prayers in Arabic.
People want to say that spirituality is characteristic of Sappho's time and conspicuous consumption characteristic of ours. Looking at what I've just written, I'm not so very sure.
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