Saturday was occupied with a drive around the east side of Lesvos, from Skala Loutron to Petra, thence to Molyvos, and back home (with a few detours).
The first detour was off the road in the middle of a valley, far from any of the villages, with Mt. Olympus - the other one - glooming in the distance. There is a Roman aqueduct in this lonely place, seventy feet high if it's an inch. When it was built, it stretched from Olympus all the way to Mytilini, a distance which takes two hours to cover by car. There are only parts of it left now, but what survives is amazing; it seems fragile, like one good earthquake would send its arches crashing to the ground, but it is in fact hollow. The original engineers were able to climb inside it and clean limescale out of the water's pathways. Like the Aqua Augusta in Rome, the aqueduct on Lesbos slopes downwards with a regular decline of two inches per mile - a feat which modern engineers are almost unable to reproduce with stone arches.
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Lesbos has been a bastion of left-wing sympathy for decades. The Greek Communists are the most popular political party on the island, and collectivist living reaches down to the bone in these far-scattered villages and townships. (Perhaps the net result of millenia of subsistence living - Lesbos, like most of Greece, has the kind of arid landscape where the only things which flourish are goats and olive trees.)
The Petra Women's Labour Collective was set up in the Seventies with the passage of the Greek Equal Rights Act, in order to give the island's women more opportunities to work outside the home. Greek culture being what it was (and to an extent still is), any man who worked in Lesbos' olive factories was an eligible catch, while any woman who did the same was assumed to be damaged goods. The Collective still runs most of the businesses in Petra: in one taverna, where we stopped for lunch on the upper deck, (canvas awning full-bellied with the sun above us, stone walls and tentacles twirling like flypaper as they dried) the menu had a brief explanation of the Collective's history and some photos of the members from the 80s and 90s. They looked like a cross between a hippy commune and a very relaxed order of nuns, heavy pullovers and turtlenecks the order of the day. The Collective seems like a romantic gesture, a hangover of Communist practicality, but the work the Petra women undertook then and still do today is dauntingly, ferociously hard: olive pressing, timber clearing, beekeeping, rug-weaving, hand-crafting ceramics, cooking for forty or fifty people at a go.
My Greek is nowhere good enough to ask, but I wondered how the original Collective members - many of whom must still be active now - viewed their work when they first began. Did they see it as radical, as I would describe it from my third-wave feminist viewpoint, or as an extension of the work that Lesbian women had always done, just taken to a bigger sphere? Should that even be phrased as an either/or question?
Petra isn't the only place with a collective; in Molyvos, an old town with a medieval fortress and cobble-streets winding up the mountainside, we stopped for coffee on the back balcony of a kafeneio. It was the Kafeneio of the Municipality of Molyvos: rather than being a private business, every person in the town has a stake in it. It was a cheerful place, with dark red and butter-yellow walls, window-boxes full of morning glories, and clusters of old men playing checkers in the back room. Fug of cigarette smoke and bouzouki music on the radio (everybody here smokes with gleeful abandon).
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It would appear to be part of local law that all tavernas on this island must be staffed by extraordinarily attractive Greek girls in their early twenties.
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On the way home from Molyvos we stopped at some salt flats, glassy and still under the setting sun. There were birds on the flats, which we quickly recognized as flamingoes. Ridiculous birds - masses of pink fluff balanced on pipe-cleaner legs - they had a kind of elegance to them as they dipped their beaks into the water, taking the blessing of salt and weeds on their tongues. The sun set in a haze over mount Olympus (there is no road to high Olympus, Sappho whispers out of time) and we bowled home past the roadside shrines and the fields of gnarled trees, windows rolled down, Melina Merkouri on the CD player.
Pace Sappho: I would indeed think to touch the sky with two arms.
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